Join us Friday as we celebrate the birthday of Glenn Gould.

We will be celebrating the recordings and life of Glenn Gould with complete recordings throughout the day, beginning with Bach's Keyboard Concerto #3 at 9:00am.

 

"At live concerts I feel demeaned, like a vaudevillian".

"Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there also a dropped hammer".

"Mozart died too late rather than too soon".

 

Ok Glenn Gould was fairly strong in his opinions, and his eccentricites were somewhat confusing, bewildering and laughable to many (see below):

He was a world-class hypochondriac. He feared drafts and cold, wearing heavy sweaters, scarves, gloves and overcoats even in the hottest weather. He was terrified of germs, refusing to go to a hospital to visit his dying mother. He was frightened by physical contact, canceling a dozen concerts and suing after a piano-tuner jostled him. He gobbled vast amounts of pills in lieu of food.

He crouched below the keyboard, sitting 14 inches off the floor on a chair his father had built and which he insisted on using his entire life. He refused to have it reupholstered, and so after the original padding wore away it became a medieval torture device, with only a single narrow beam running down the middle of the seat from front to back, forcing his entire body weight onto his groin.

He refused to play Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Debussy and much of the other core piano repertoire, deriding their masterpieces as empty theatrical gestures. He ridiculed concertos as an embarrasing wasteland that gratified "the primeval human need for showing off." He insisted that the obscure Orlando Gibbons was the greatest composer of all time.

He condemned concerts as a degrading blood sport that detracted attention from the purity of the music and never again performed in public after his "retirement" at age 31 (although he faked his "return" in a mock recital ostensibly broadcast from an oil rig).

... And that is just a few of his eccentricities.

 

However, there is no denying the impact he made on the Classical world, and how cherished he is among Canadians. Arguably the most important figure in Canadian classical music history, Gould reached audiences far and wide, and to this day his recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations are considered the pinnacle.

His peculiar playing position let him achieve a purity of touch and an evenness of tone that the muscular, shoulder-heavy playing of his peers couldn't approach. Deafening noise enabled him to rely upon an "inner ear of the imagination" and to push his aural ideal beyond the limitations of actual sound. His contempt for standard repertoire led him to proselytize for important but neglected material in lieu of the same tired pieces his peers constantly programmed.

Most important of all, forsaking concerts led him to the recording studio as a creative outlet. While most classical artists of his time claimed to be repulsed by the artifice of the recording process, Gould came to view it as the only reliable means to capture and convey an artistic conception and embraced its creative possibilities to craft some of the most remarkable piano albums ever released. He used multiple microphones to build novel acoustical environments, played fearlessly at a super-human pace with the assurance that flaws would be corrected, and seized upon the resources of editing to fashion subtly complex emotional interpretations by intersplicing dozens of different takes.

Gould took the world by storm with his very first LP. Born and raised in Toronto, he had concertized for a decade throughout Canada but had established a strictly local reputation. Only a few curious souls attended his 1955 New York debut, but among them was the head of the classical division of Columbia Records. Stunned by Gould's brilliance and intrigued by a challenging program that shunned all the usual crowd-pleasers for obscurities both old (Gibbons, Sweelink and Bach) and new (Webern and Berg), he signed the youngster to a long-term exclusive contract the very next day, an unprecedented move at the time for a major label.

Gould's record debut was the Bach Goldberg Variations, a set of 32 rather staid, formal pieces, commissioned in 1742 to help its insomniac patron fall asleep. Such a reaction to Gould's radical reconception, though, would be unthinkable. In lieu of performing the work with traditional refined grace on an authentic instrument, Gould regarded it as "pregnant with promise and capacity for exhaustive exploitation," and proceeded to unleash his bold vision on a concert grand using extreme tempos, huge dynamics and phenomenal technique. Columbia stoked enthusiasm by inviting critics to observe the sessions, and they dutifully reported the new curiosity in the throes of his eccentricities. The album flew to the top of the classical charts and through constant LP, cassette and CD reissues has remained a best-seller ever since.

Gould established an instant reputation as a Bach specialist, and with good reason. A half-century earlier Wanda Landowska had rescued Bach from romanticized high-calorie orchestrations and bloated keyboard adaptations by playing his works on the harpsichord with dignity and humanism. Her records remain deeply moving, but it was Gould who went further to foster a genuine love and passion for Bach. His style was precise, his rhythms were crisp and the clarity of his counterpoint was underlined by avoiding the blurred pedal effects typical of other pianists. The result was deeply respectful of the inherent values of the source, yet vibrant and exciting. Over the next 25 years, Gould recorded nearly all the other Bach keyboard solos. They enthralled many, repelled some, but, most important, stimulated discussion and renewed interest in a neglected genius.

Actually, Gould did record some of the standard repertoire, including a complete set of the Mozart piano sonatas and many of Beethoven's. While they were far from idiomatic and were generally written off as perverse, for those who already know these works Gould's approach can be a revelation. For example, Gould sped up the first movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata and drained it of inflection in order to suggest a wistful dance rather than wallowing in the usual melancholy despair. On the other hand, he decelerated the first movement of the "Appassionata" Sonata to barely half its standard pace, exaggerating its pauses and bass-heavy sonority to turn its drama into very heavy melodrama.

 

source: Peter Gutmann 2001-2003

 

Let the music speak for itself: