A canny pianist takes listeners on a rewarding journey through Bachtian fields on a CD that is at once playful and arresting. When I heard Lara Downes perform music from her intriguing new CD, 13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg, at a wine bar in Portland, Oregon, she didn t announce any of the names of the composers whose new variations on J.S. Bach s immortal aria she was playing. Instead, starting with Bach s aria, she played half a dozen or so of the pieces back to back, just as you d hear Bach s original Goldberg Variations in performance. At first, this annoyed me, as I wanted to adjust my expectations according to the composer s name. But then I realized that it made me really focus on the music (Was that a 12-tone piece? Did I hear a little jazz thing happen? Is it 12-tone now? Ah, there goes a fugue!) instead of preconceptions, which made me listen much more intently. I recommend the same unprepared way of first listening to Downes new CD, which, along with the titular baker s dozen of new variations, contains Bach s original and a reprise, plus bonus tracks by Lukas Foss and Dave Brubeck as well as another Bach piece that means much to her, the Sarabande from the French Suite BWV 816. Downes (who credits Glenn Gould s famous 1955 recording as a major inspiration for her career) says the project felt like a journey rather than merely a collection of diverse interpretations, though it s certainly that as well. By the time her performance ended, in part because I didn t have a preconceived notion of each port of call, I did feel as though I d made a journey through musical time and space.  Commissioned by the Gilmore Festival and premiered by the great new-music pianist Gilbert Kalish in 2004, the set lives up to its Wallace Stevens derived title by presenting varied perspectives on one of classical music s hardiest perennials, forcing not only a new look at Bach but also an appreciation for how much stylistic variety our present era affords composers and listeners. The composers didn t consult one another, and the responses vary wildly. Several take the familiar melody as a starting point; another seems, at least initially, to follow the harmonic structure; and others appear to partake of little more than its mood. Fred Lehrdahl s take is surprisingly playful; Jennifer Higdon s is characteristically ebullient and rhythmically charged, with fleeting touches of Chopin and Mozart; Foss mood is ruminative, a little wistful. Only whispers of the original flit through Bright Sheng s dissonances and Mischa Zupko s probing explorations, while Ralf Gothóni s Variation on Variation With Variation sticks closest to Bach. Ryan Brown s delicate Ornament and jazz pianist/composer Fred Hersch s Melancholy Minuet live up to their respective titles. David Del Tredici s My Goldberg sounds a bit like Rachmaninov s might have, with a blue moment. William Bolcom s rising-and-tumbling Yet Another Goldberg Variation is the most fun, while his former student Derek Bermel s Kontraphnunktus is, unsurprisingly for this delightfully unpredictable composer, the set s most arresting, built on an insistent 11-note theme initially unrecognizable as Goldbergian. I can imagine many of these reimaginings actually entering the repertoire as encore material. As she did live in Portland, Downes plays them all persuasively, with due regard for their stylistic differences, yet always retaining a Bachian flavor. At the Portland performances, Downes enthusiastically chatted with audience members about her project and even solicited their responses to the music. Her presentation truly brought the audience closer to the music in a way I wish could happen more often with new sounds. She made the audience feel like fellow travelers on this exceptionally rewarding journey. --Brett Campbell: San Francisco Classical VoiceOur early-fall Classical Roundup features several remarkable women, from a retrospective honoring violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter to Lara Downes' modern update on Bach's Goldberg Variations.  Another recording of Bach's Goldberg is likely to inspire yawns from fans of the work. Why bother with something other than Glenn Gould's 1955 revolutionizing performance? Pianist Lara Downes' approach to the influential variations for keyboard comes via a 2004 commission of works by 20th-century composers, including Lukas Foss, Bright Sheng, Dave Brubeck and 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Higdon. The work fractured and rearranged versions of Bach's variations is as refreshing as Downes' performance. --Nate Cavalieri: Rhapsody.comJust like the Hubble Telescope can now see the universe around 200 million years after it was created, almost any given major cultural trend or event can be seen duplicated years after. In reality, overwhelmingly powerful telescopes certainly aren t needed to see these reoccurrences. After a while, it s easy to get tired of the sequence, especially when these identical ideas are thought of as new and cutting edge. There are always exceptions to the dry cycle; or, rather, occurrences that take the cycle itself and shape it into something completely different. One of these occurrences appears on a CD released September 13th called 13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg performed by the pianist Lara Downes. Not only is this collection of music a gorgeous album of piano playing, but it s also a significant reinvention of one of most classic and respected anthologies of piano pieces. The Goldberg Variations themselves, especially Gould s multiple renditions of them, stand on some of the highest pedestals in the gigantic museum of musical legends. So, logically, one would either have to blow Gould out of the water or make something magnificent and different in order to stand out among the height of these pedestals. Lara Downes, with the help of 13 others, has done that.  13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg is a set of new pieces inspired by the aria of the Goldbergs, the piece that is the subject of the original variations themselves. Thirteen composers were commissioned to write these solo piano works by the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival in 2004, where they were originally played by the pianist Gilbert Kalish. From baroque tinged to unmistakably Chopin to fugal, the variations on the Goldbergs take the listener s lens on the iconic pieces and throw it into an entirely different realm. The project was inspired by the poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by Wallace Stevens, a minimalist and mind-blowing portrait of perspective. The fifth stanza of that poem includes the basic idea of the 13 Ways project: I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty of innuendoes, The blackbird whistling Or just after. Instead of taking the aria itself and simply placing it in a different genre s template, the composers took those inflections and innuendos and created pieces that reflected them in unique lights. There are too many variations on the Variations to mention at length, though all of them contribute to the experience of listening to the recording. Derek Bermel s Kontraphunktus, besides being labeled with the best tongue-in-cheek title on the album, is a piece constantly searching for a landing spot, but seems to be frantically looking the entire time in dissonant ways. Both Fred Hersch s Melancholy Minuet and David del Tredici s My Goldberg give neo-romanticism looks on the project. William Bolcom s Yet Another Goldberg Variation is all for the left hand. And yet, they all still seem to at least be looking up at the Goldbergs like children, because they are, in a sense. Downes s playing on the recording is perfect for a recording of this type. She has a personal connection with the Goldbergs; she was a little girl in my father s big chair, listening to Glenn Gould s 1955 recording of the Goldbergs, wondering at the twists and turns of Bach s creation and Gould s imagination. Her emphases in each piece seem just right they re not too pronounced and overzealous, something that shouldn t happen when tipping the hat to Bach, but shape the pieces in a ways that brings them full circle. --Elena Saavedra Buckley: Sequenza 21