Re: salzburg recital (bryce morrison)

[Jim Morrison <jim_morrison@sprynet.com>]

Hi fminor

I hope I don't get sued for this, but here's what Bryce Morrison had to say
about the Salzburg recital.

I really must track down this CD.  Thanks for the comments on it.


Jim



"Salzburg Recital, 1959 Glenn Gould (pf).

 Sony Classical mono (Mid  price) (CD) SMK53474 (76 minutes: ADD). Recorded
at a performance during the Salzburg Festival on August 25th, 1959.

Bach Goldberg Variations, BWV988. Mozart Keyboard Sonata in C, K330/K300h.
Schoenberg Suite, Op. 25. Sweelinck Fantasia.

Bach Goldberg Variations, BWV988. Joao Carlos Martins (pf).

 Labor Records (Full price) (CD) LAB7008-2 (46 minutes: DDD). Recorded 1980.

 Glenn Gould's recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations are scattered like
gold-dust throughout the catalogue, and there are still more to come. Any
other pianist would risk a sense of duplication, but such is Gould's nature
and pianism that each and every reading casts its own spell; creates its own
ambience and fascination. Here, his performance forms the major part of his
legendary 1959 Salzburg recital, given when he was 27 and already near the
end of his brief but dazzling public career. Elfin and teasing Gould has
rarely worn his astonishing expertise more lightly or engagingly, or
illuminated every facet of Bach's timeless masterpiece with a more
nonchalant sense of its glory. His 'black pearl' (Var. 25) is lightened with
a silvery clarity that he would later darken with greater speculation and
time and again Bach's polyphony is playfully but never irresponsibly pointed
and coloured. His virtuosity in Vars. 5 and 6 is ethereal rather than
pressured and, throughout, the constant play of light and shade suggests
only the most transcendental pianism and musicianship.

  All this falls like manna from heaven after Joao Carlos Martins's disc,
part of a survey of Bach's complete keyboard works. True, Martins (whom many
will recall as a hell-bent 20-year-old virtuoso in Ginastera's First
Concerto) comes with an encomium from Cortot, who was understandably awed by
Martins's force and articulacy, his positive explosion of energy. Yet how
wilful and eccentric his performance seems after Gould's. Where Gould is
natural and ebullient, Martins is idiosyncratic, underlining his points with
the heaviest of red pencils. The Aria itself is painfully slow, rising to a
thunderous, quasi-operatic declamation; too often grim determination
replaces musical exultance or luminosity. This is particularly true of his
'shot-from-guns' virtuosity in Var. No. 11, while in No. 25 - the nodal and
expressive centre of the work - he shies away from its intense and tortuous
harmonic life. He casts an impressionistic haze over No. 26, offers a touch
of grandiloquence in No. 29 (almost as if it were romantically hyphenated
Bach) and, in conclusion, hammers home the theme like some apocalyptic
utterance rather than returning us to a final solace or benediction.

  Returning gratefully to Gould you can hear Sweelinck's solemnities offered
with rare significance, Schoenberg's Op. 25 spun off with hallucinatory
magic, and Mozart's K330 Sonata played with a truly extraordinary cunning,
elegance and artifice. Here, indeed, is a "sensually charged but
intellectually controlled artistic temperament", an assuaging alternative to
later utterances which sometimes crystallized into pendantry and
affectation. This is a disc beyond price; a crowning touch to Gould's
endlessly fascinating discography.





 BM"