Sometimes it's all in the hair. Forty-five-year-old Joanna MacGregor's braids and 31-year-old Paul Lewis' curly mane proclaim them to be the wild things of English piano playing, and last week both gave nationally broadcast recitals to full houses.
MacGregor, well known in China for her recent collaboration with Jin Xing, was playing Bach, and Lewis, Beethoven. Bach's keyboard oeuvre is sometimes called the Old Testament of classical music and Beethoven's the New Testament. So, between them, we had a chance to sample the whole book.
MacGregor gave the first recital, at lunchtime on Monday, at the Wigmore Hall, playing all 31 of Bach's Goldberg Variations. They were originally written to send an aristocrat to sleep. Count Kayserling, an insomniac, hired one of Bach's best pupils, the 14-year-old John Goldberg, to play the harpsichord to send him to sleep. Bach wrote his Aria with Diverse Variations for Harpsichord as part of this sleep-inducing experiment, a work which later acquired the name of the Count's teenage harpsichordist. Bach's Variations must have worked. The Count later sent him a hundred gold coins - more than his annual salary.
Had Joanna MacGregor been playing for him, the Count wouldn't have slept a wink. MacGregor raced though the Goldberg as if her dreadlocks were on fire, peddling furiously as she rushed along.
The great Bach interpreter, Andreas Schiff, took 73 minutes to complete the Goldberg when he last played it at the Wigmore Hall. MacGregor took a mere 48. She did not, however, leave any gaps, whereas Schiff did. Even without gaps MacGregor's performance clipped a good 20 minutes of Schiff's - probably a world record in speed piano playing.
MacGregor's Variations were the musical equivalent of the one-minute mile. She was trying to be a virtuoso, but at that speed she couldn't properly articulate. There was no pace difference between the variations, and for the audience there was no time to think of what we'd heard before we were rushed off to the next variation.