GG: a tribute to a great pianist

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

I found this in a CD booklet today:

"Great pianists, we are told, are hothouse creations.  It's no use
drifting into this career if you intend to reach the heights.  You must
devote yourself to the quest for perfection as early as possible and stay
with it, single-mindedly.  But [Glenn Gould], one of the greatest pianists
of the 20th century (some would say *the* greatest), is a striking
exception.  As a teenager his unwillingness to practise alarmed his
parents, and one of the chief reasons for their sending him to study with
[Alberto Guerrero] was that they had been assured that [Guerrero] would
hold their son's nose firmly to the grindstone.  [Gould], however, wanted
only to compose. (...)

"By [1960] [Gould] had become--to borrow Harold C Schonberg's phrase--'an
international piano idol.' The music of [Bach] (...) had become one of his
specialties.  After hearing him play the [Goldberg Variations], the
American critic W. J. Henderson wrote that 'there was nothing left for us
but to thank our stars that we had lived when [Gould] did and heard him,
out of the divine might of his genius...But one thing must not be
forgotten: there was no iconoclast engaged; [Bach] was still [Bach].'"

"Not everyone would agree with that last claim.  The pianist Claudio
Arrau, for instance, was indignant that [Gould] could even think of
re-composing the final bars of the [D Minor English Suite's Gavotte] (as
he does on this recording), though there was hardly any dissent about the
quality of his pianism *per se*.  The score-reading listener will find
more departures from the written [Bach], here and in some of the other
works on this disc.  But over and above these are moments of breathtaking
musicianship.  (...) And even when he allows himself an adjustment here or
there, [Gould] sees each piece whole.  Form, for him, was not merely a
question of identifying sections; it was at the foundation of the musical
experience.  In any piece, from the grand [Goldberg Variations] to the
shortest of the [preludes and fugues], there was only one climax--or as he
liked to put it, one 'point.' Miss it, as he told his friend the poet
Marietta Shaginian, and 'the structure crumbles, the work goes soft and
fuzzy.' The listener will find nothing soft or fuzzy here, only clarity,
rhythmic vitality, rich variety of tone and mood, elegance and a
[sparkling articulation] that can bring fresh appeal to music that today
more than ever is in danger of being loved to death."

---

Nice tribute, and it seems like typical GG hagiography.

But why all the [brackets]?

Because this essay was really about:
[Sergei Rachmaninoff]
[Nikolai Zverev at the Moscow Conservatory]
[middle of the 1920's]
[Chopin] 
[Second Sonata]
[waltzes and mazurkas]
[singing legato]

It is in the notes to the album "Rachmaninoff Plays Chopin," recorded
1919-1935, reissued 1994.

I find it intriguing that Rachmaninoff and Gould both got this type of
very similar critical notices, but their piano playing and interpretations
were more than "worlds apart" in style.  "Solar systems apart" might be
accurate.

Bradley Lehman ~ Harrisonburg VA, USA ~ 38.45716N+78.94565W
bpl@umich.edu ~ http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl/