Glenn Gould

A friend sent me a link from another blog that featured this clip from YouTube.

Glenn Gould has been my favorite Bach pianist, and one of my favorite musical figures, for a couple decades now. This clip of him playing the canonic variations of Bach's Goldberg Variations demonstrates his deft treading of the line between genius and madness. He had a peculiarly pointed talent--and an especially happy and salient one for contrapuntal music--for kind of dividing his brain into however many segments as he had independent musical parts to play, so that every part is equally before you, as with a string quartet. The result is a great transparency and independence of musical lines. Though he imposed his very strong musical personality on whatever he played, his interpretations still seem to offer a greater display of Bach's unfathomable genius than any other pianist.

And yet to watch him at work, he seems like a nutcase, muttering and singing to himself while he plays, and swaying obsessively. Any free hand when he plays suddenly conducts the other hand, like a child trying to direct traffic from his carseat. He played his whole career--including concerts at Carnegie Hall and everywhere else--on a rickety, seatless folding wooden chair (the creaking of which is plainly audible in his recordings) with the legs sawn off so that his posture was very low relative to the keyboard. When this childhood artifact eventually fell apart, he had a duplicate rickety folding chair custom-made. Later in life, he even took to putting the piano up on blocks to exaggerate the posture. (You can see all of this here.) He would cross his legs while he played, often pedalling with the left foot, and was known to play concerts without his shoes. The list goes on and on.

Nutty genius, maybe, but still genius. His sound is immediately identifiable, and his body of recorded work puts him unquestionably among the greatest musicians of the 20th Century.

For those not familiar, here's an introduction.



This performance is interesting for other reasons. Gould made two recordings of the Goldberg Variations, as bookends to his performance career, and the early, 1955 version (which made him a classical music superstar virtually overnight) is, sonically speaking, an old recording now. Old, noisy, mono. An article in the New York Times tells of how someone has now developed the software to take this old recording and re-create the performance on a Yamaha Disklavier grand piano, the recording of which will be available in May of this year.

That's fabulous technology, but another post.