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September 21, 2003
VIDEO Glenn Gould's Alchemy Up Close By ALLAN KOZINN ome video was in its infancy when the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould died in 1982, but had he lived longer, he would unquestionably have embraced video as an extension of what he had been doing for nearly two decades. Gould was as famous for having given up live performance in favor of recordings as he was for his galvanizing interpretations of Bach. Soon after he retired from the stage at 31, in 1964, he began to study the technical side of recording, and he eventually took complete control of his sessions. He also had a parallel career making television and radio programs for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. They included solo and chamber performances of repertory ranging from Bach to Schoenberg, as well as oddities like Strauss's "Enoch Arden," usually with discussions to set the stage. Like Leonard Bernstein, Gould saw the power and potential of television as a medium through which to explain and convey classical music to huge audiences. And he was one of the few musicians who had both the imagination and the opportunity to tap that power fully. Sony Classical, Gould's record label, released a lot of this material in an expansive VHS series in the 1990's, with volumes devoted to Beethoven and 20th-century music, an ample selection of Bach performances and an installment devoted to Gould's conducting. But most of these programs have long been out of print, and until recently, hardly any of Gould's video recordings were available on DVD. Now a hefty load of Gouldiana has hit the DVD bins, and much of it comes from the CBC, but those organically conceived programs remain unavailable. Instead, the CBC has licensed three recent Gould documentaries — "Life and Times," a useful and fairly comprehensive biography; "The Russian Journey," chronicling his 1957 visit to Moscow and St. Petersburg; and "Extasis," a maddening festival of Gould worship — to Kultur Video, which has released them separately and as a boxed set, "The Glenn Gould Collection." There is better news from EMI Classics, which has released Bruno Monsaingeon's 1974 television film, "The Alchemist," in its Classic Archive series. The first of several programs Mr. Monsaingeon made with Gould, this is the real deal: 2 hours 40 minutes of Gould performing a recital's worth of music as well as holding forth in interview segments and, generally, just being Gould, which is to say, an amusing but controlling eccentric. A lengthy recording session sequence, Mr. Monsaingeon tells us in booklet notes, was fully scripted, down to which wrong note Gould would play during a bad take. His acting in this bogus documentary material is amazingly natural; if Mr. Monsaingeon had not confessed, few viewers would have been the wiser. Chances are, a real Gould recording session did not differ greatly. In the first part of this segment, Gould works on the English Suite No. 1, taking a variety of tempos and approaches, and commenting on each. "That's boring," he says of a stately reading of the first Bourrée, and he immediately plunges into a faster, high-voltage account. "Too crazy" is the verdict. He settles for something between, but leaning decidedly toward "crazy." Later, he takes up Scriabin. To record "Désir" and "Caresse Dansée" (Op. 57, Nos. 1 and 2), he has his engineer set up microphones at increasing distances from the piano: the first pair right over the strings; the last, far enough away that they will pick up mostly reverberance. During playback, he sculptures the sound, having the engineer fade the various tracks in and out: a close sound for this phrase, a distant sound for the rejoinder. It's a bit loopy, but it's the kind of thing that made Gould an object of fascination in his time and has kept him one in the two decades since. The recording session is the second of four segments in "The Alchemist." The first and third also mix music with conversation (not scripted, Mr. Monsaingeon writes). In addition to Gould's disdain for touring and live performance, and his theories about recording, the topics cover a range of composers from Gibbons and Byrd to Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. These discussions are punctuated by performances of the Toccata from Bach's Partita No. 6, the Intermezzo from Schoenberg's Suite (Op. 25), short pieces by Gibbons and Byrd, Webern's Variations (Op. 27) and Berg's Sonata (Op. 1), as well as an informal bash at Wagner's "Meistersinger" Act I Prelude. A substantial program, it is also a reminder of the breadth of Gould's interests. The fourth part of the film dispenses with discussion and offers a complete reading of Bach's Sixth Partita. Except for the Wagner, these performances are complete and thoroughly focused, and some — the Bach partita and the Berg sonata, for example — have a visceral power that Gould's audio recordings do not match. Gould was, after all, a remarkably visual performer. His preference for performing on a low chair made for a peculiar — and thus signature — posture, which he made even stranger by hunching over the keyboard or swaying away from it. Then there was his penchant for using his left hand to conduct what his right hand was playing. When it was time for the left hand to take up its own line, Gould would bring it to the keyboard with a graceful gesture that made his conducting and playing seem a single gesture. NATURALLY, the performances in "The Alchemist" are thoroughly choreographed. The movement of the camera and the cutting among angles seem closely linked to Gould's phrasing, a visual analogue to his tinkering with sonic distances in the Scriabin. Even the way his fingers move when the camera is on them appears to have been something he considered. In addition, most of the performances are filmed against white, as if Gould and his piano were floating at an idealized remove from the trappings of concerts and film. The few exceptions, like the Schoenberg performance, in which one sees the lighting apparatus, are undoubtedly deliberate: Gould's comment, perhaps, on the artifice of Schoenberg's style. Surprisingly, all this is more exciting than obtrusive. The CBC-Kultur set can scarcely compete with this, but it has its moments. "Life and Times" (1998) offers a trove of rarely seen photographs, film clips and interviews with Gould and relatives, colleagues and friends. But the most telling comments are those of Dr. Helen Mesaros, a psychiatrist and the author of "Psychobiography of a Virtuoso," who argues that some of Gould's eccentricities — like the fear of germs that led him to wear a coat, scarf and gloves even in the summer — could be pinned on his overprotective mother or were rituals meant to diminish performance anxiety. Some of the material is heartbreaking. Notebooks in Gould's hand show that he obsessively charted his temperature, blood pressure and glucose levels, and his friends recall unsuccessful attempts to persuade him that self-diagnosis, overmedication and a poor diet could be dangerous. It seems almost unsurprising that he suffered the stroke that killed him at the indecently early age of 50. But Gould's sense of humor and playfulness are also examined in this rounded portrait. "The Russian Journey" (2002) focuses on a moment in Gould's career that has largely been forgotten, at least in the West. Gould was entirely unknown when he arrived in Moscow in 1957, the first Western pianist to perform there during the cold war, and the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory was only half full when he began to play. But he so quickly wowed his audience with a Bach program that at intermission, listeners phoned their friends and insisted that they come to the hall, which was packed during the second half. Gould also created a stir in lectures at the Moscow and St. Petersburg conservatories, where he was supposed to speak about Bach but ended up discussing Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School, which was out of favor with Soviet officialdom. "Extasis" (1993) includes interviews with musicians, including the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, the pianist Anton Kuerti and some younger Canadian players, as well as critics and friends, all of them enlisted to proclaim Gould's genius. This grows tiresome almost immediately, and even the occasional wisps of critical perspective — his Mozart is called what it was, perverse — fail to dispel the sickly perfume of hagiography. Worse, the interviews are punctuated by trendily filmed sequences in which a reader, Jean-Louis Millette, often standing before building-size projections of Gould (or himself), intones extraordinary nonsense, drawn from Michel Schneider's "Glenn Gould: Piano Solo": "He courted pain the way one invents sources. He cultivated misunderstanding the way children enjoy disguising themselves. He wanted to be possessed by his soul to the point of forgetting he had a body." The real problem with these three productions is that amid all this talk about Gould, they offer only fragments of performances, enough to tantalize but not enough to invite repeated viewing. Each disc offers one or two brief, uncut performances as bonus tracks — a Sweelinck fantasy, a Beethoven bagatelle (Op. 126, No. 3) and the inevitable Bach: the last two movements of the F minor Concerto (BWV 1056) and the Contrapunctus No. 4 from "The Art of Fugue." But this is scant nourishment for anyone more interested in actually hearing Gould's music-making than in having his genius extolled or his idiosyncrasies cataloged. Given the treasures in the CBC archives, there is no reason that imbalance can't be redressed. |