I feel so intellectual because I've been listening to the Goldberg Variations in the car the last few days. There was an article in last month's BBC Music Magazine about them, picking the best recording (they preferred Andras Schiff over Glenn Gould), but the only one I have is a recent acquisition from the Great Pianists series with Maria Yudina, who I'd never heard of before. One of these Soviet-era artists who was never allowed to tour and barely allowed to perform or teach even within Russia as she ran afoul of the authorities over her religious views. These are originally Melodiya recordings, so the sound engineering isn't the greatest, but it seems to be a pretty decent performance of a work that I don't think I've ever heard before in its entirety. I remember seeing something on tv a long time ago with Andre Michel-Schub, who told the anecdote that one time at the end of a recital he went backstage while the applause was still continuing and asked the stage manager "what should I play for an encore?" and he said, "How about the Goldberg Variations?", so he did. They're actually in my Dover edition of Keyboard Music of JS Bach, but I don't think I've ever tried to play through them. Bach isn't that easy to sightread to begin with, and all the ornamentation makes it even more difficult, so I haven't spent much time playing Bach since I've been back in piano mode. I wouldn't mind getting the new release of both versions of Gould's rendition, plus they're also on one of the Rosalyn Tureck CD's in the Great Pianists series, too, and that's probably enough. I'm sure Schiff is good, too, I heard him do Book I of the WTC as a recital when I was in college (with two intermissions). They also had recommendations for harpsichord versions of the variations, but that I think I could live without.