Alexandre Tharaud, St John’s Smith Square, London, review: Excellent playing fails to cast a spell

This church has a notoriously ‘wet’ acoustic and the fine detail of Bach's Goldberg Variations took place in a blur

The young French pianist Alexandre Tharaud (Marco Borggreve)

The young French pianist Alexandre Tharaud took a nine-month sabbatical from performing to immerse himself sufficiently in Bach’s Goldberg Variations to make a record, and he’s now touring the results of his labours. He talks of the ‘luxury of examining just a few notes from every angle’, and of ‘digging away at the unknown’ like an archaeologist, but that was not how his interpretation came across in St John’s Smith Square.

This great Baroque church has a notoriously ‘wet’ acoustic – ie with the sound taking a long time to die away – and the fine detail and ornamentation of the first few variations took place in a blur: if the acoustic wasn’t to blame, it must have been Tharaud’s pedalling, or maybe it was both. Only with Variation 13 did he seem to get his bearings, as the harmonies drifted gracefully between major and minor; the triplets of the next variation skittered blithely, and the lament of the following one had a proper plangency. Tharaud rose to the occasion with the celebrated ‘Black Pearl’ variation, after which it was a steady canter to the end. But whereas Andras Schiff’s Prom performance last summer left us feeling we had been on a vast and transformative circular journey, this performance just stopped: despite the excellence of Tharaud’s playing, the hoped-for spell was not cast.