GG: At Home with GG, singing, Faustus

[Mary Jo Watts <mwatts@rci.rutgers.edu>]

Now here's a find!

I managed to obtain a copy of the CD that the GG foundation will be
(is?) offering for sale (and to fortissimo "friends").  It's called
_Glenn Gould at Home_ and is taken from the whole interview GG did with
Vincent Tovell, part of which appears in the video, _Glenn Gould On and
Off the Record_. It took place in 1959 when GG was 26 (my age-- yikes.)
And the interview is one of the few he did which was entirely
unscripted.

Oddly, so many of those Gouldian opinions are already set at that early
age-- the hatred of concerts, the enthusiasm for recording, the piano as
a means to an interpretive end, composing in the "arch-romantic idiom."
Some surprises-- he confesses love for Bizet ("marvelous composer"),
Rameau (to a degree), Carabini (sp? "wonderful composer" who is this?)
and a love for theater!  

There are the recorded excerpts of Bruckner's String Quartet, brief
excerpts of Fugue 1 from The Art of the Fugue played on the piano as
Chopin would play it (!), then as it should be played as influenced by
organ training (with GG's vocalese), excerpts from GG's string quartet
on the piano (read from sheet music-- "pure Bruckner", he calls it);
Schvnberg's Suite for Piano, op. 25; the third movement from Webern's
Variations for piano, op. 27; Fugue #4 from the Art of (wonderful!);
brief excerpt from Beethoven's Piano Sonata op. 111 (as jazz!); excerpt
from Morawetz's Fantasy (#1); an excerpt Sibelius's Symphony #5 on
piano; excerpts of Ein Heldenleben (improvised with much singing); and
GG speaking in an accent as Bruckner...

Re: the GG singing thread-- you haven't lived until you've heard GG sing
his own string quartet!  
 
To Jvrgen--  GG mentions Dr. Faustus when talking about Webern: 

	"Adrian Leverk|hn who was modeled rather maliciously after 		Schvnberg
as a 12 tone composer, is having a consultation with his 	friend, the
narrator of the book. And his friend very 			perspicaciously says 'Well,
Adrian for all that you have developed 	the principles of harmony, for
all that you have enriched the 		language (I transcribe approximately)
and have added dimensions of 	counterpoint that were undreamed of in
previous generations, you 	remain rythmically as four square as any of
we Germans.' And this is 	absolutely true about Schvnberg and in fact
about most of the 12 	tone tradition in Germany.  But with Webern
gradually as he 		assimilated what the 12 tone technique meant to him,
it became a 	very personal kind of expression in which individual
intervals 		usually of two notes only formed or represented an entire
phrase, an 	entire idea as much as would 2 or 3 bars of statement in
more 		conventional music..." [end GG quote]


-Mary Jo