Re: GG...and that harpsichord

[Jim Morrison <jim_morrison@sprynet.com>]

Welcome aboard on the discussion Anne.  I've been waiting for you always
enjoyable comments.

If anyone wants to see GG play on the much-maligned Wittmayer  harpsichord
(it looks a bit like a box made of scraps from a tornado-hit trailer) they
should track down the GG videos I Prologue and IV So you want to write a
fugue.  The two Bach pieces that he plays on the Handel cd can be found
separately on those videos.

I've been listening to the cd as well today and tracks 1, 9, 13, and 14
sound particularly other-worldly and atemporal, perhaps pantemporal, to me.
Track one really announces to everyone listening that this will be a
harpsichord recording like no other.  I think he's saying to Bradley and
other harpsichord specialists like him "Abandon all hope."


GG being GG I think the really surprising thing about a GG harpsichord
recording would have been if it had sounded like a traditional harpsichord
recording.  That guy did not want to sound like anyone else, and I suspect
that this drive for uniqueness, combined with a lack of skill on the
harpsichord, had something to do with the way he performed .  He just didn't
have the capably on the harpsichord to make stellar, awesome records like he
did with Bach and Byrd/Gibbons on the piano.  Not wanting to sound like a
bad harpsichord player, which he had to be given that he never played on
one, he choose a different  path and made an album that sounded like no
other, thereby occluding any comparison to other harpsichord recordings to
which his would not favorable compare.

 And let's not forget, as Anne pointed out, that Gould is certainly trying
to make us smile with his rendering of the Handel Suites.

I suspect what bothers Bradley about this recording is not that is sounds
unusual (GG has the most unusual sounding pianos that I've heard on record)
but that it lacks his usual passion and genius, delivering instead whimsy
and light humor and a heavy use of easy to achieve affects and a brutal
touch on the keyboard.  They aren't sublime creations/recompositions, like,
say, the live goldbergs, or the second english suite, to mention two of my
favorite GG recordings.  But hey, they are kind of fun and I do enjoy the
Handel Suites in small doses and it is enlightening to know that the
harpsichord can sound like that, but that most people choose not to do that
to their instrument.

Jim