"A State of Wonder" - Another Review

[Bradley P Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

I saw about a dozen of the new Gould packages yesterday at a shop, and
thumbed through them all. The only one I bought was the "A State of
Wonder" which pulls together the 1955 and 1981 Goldbergs plus a bonus
disc: the Gould-scripted "interview" with Tim Page plus some of Gould's
outtakes from the recording sessions.

I've listened to both performances a couple times each since yesterday,
and they *do* seem to have a more natural piano sound than the earlier
issues do. I haven't done an A/B comparison yet; might or might not get
around to that. The 1955 sounds terrific, and that's maybe a sufficient
reason to get this set.

In the 1981 they're now using the analog masters that were made as backup
at the same time as the digitals: loaded them into a Sony Direct Stream
Digital system and then re-edited them digitally from Gould's and Samuel
Carter's production notes and score. I noticed at least one place, maybe
two, where a new splice didn't sound quite the same as the old one...a
little abrupt. But that was just in my casual listen-through...I'm not
inclined to analyze this recording much more closely than that, because I
still don't like it (for performance reasons). At least it sounds less
harsh than it used to.

The booklet notes don't contribute much that I haven't seen before, except
for some new comments by Tim Page. It has the typical batch of photos,
too. It's nice to have Gould's own 1955 liner notes included here.

The nearly 51-minute "interview" by Gould and Page is sort of interesting,
but again it didn't give me much that I hadn't already heard. The first
17.5 minutes of that were published as a soundsheet in _The Piano
Quarterly_ soon after Gould's death, and at the time I made a cassette dub
of it; I wore that out long ago from listening to it too many times. It
describes Gould's reasons for doing this second recording, and he goes
into his proportional-tempi thing. It's worth hearing if you've never
heard it before, but I feel that the first 17 minutes take care of it and
the rest of the interview is needless fluff, padding out what the first 17
minutes have already done adequately. Gould's script makes Page sound like
his uneasy puppet.

It's fun to hear Gould at work in the 12.5 minutes of outtakes from 1955.
(Like Matthew, I especially enjoyed the quodlibet of the "Star-Spangled
Banner" and "God Save the King".)

All around, is this set worth it? I guess so, marginally. If you're
going to have both these performances anyway, it's cheaper to get
them this way than individually, and the documentation and sound are
better. If you've already had both of them for dozens of years, this
upgrade is not really necessary unless you especially want to hear
the bonus disc (as I did).

And people who like the 1981 performance more than I do might have a
warmer response to this set. To me it's like heaping sauteed onions
and bacon on a piece of liver to disguise it; if one doesn't like the
liver, no quantity of onions and bacon is really going to help much.
Your mileage may vary....

My complaint remains: if they had really wanted to show us Gould's
"State of Wonder" vis-a-vis the Goldbergs, a better-rounded picture,
they could have included the outstanding 1959 Salzburg performance
and brought it up to the best sound possible. They have the rights
to it.


Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl  or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl

"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks
from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot