Re: Salzburg recital at amazon uk

[muramatsu masaaki <mmasaaki@kiwi.ne.jp>]

I totally agree with your points and the reviwer's on Salzburg recital.  The
very first note of Sweelinks piece will draw you into a fantasy. Only Gould
can make piano sound like this.

Masa-aki

on 00.11.14 5:43 AM, Jim Morrison at jim_morrison@SPRYNET.COM wrote:

> Hello List,
>
> How's this for some good news.
>
> For the relatively bargain price of 12 pounds, including
> shipping, all you United States Gould fans without the famous
> Salzburg recital can acquire it from amazon.co.UK.
>
> Skip the middle men, save a few bucks, order straight from the UK.
> Thank you internet and global economy.
>
> Mine just arrived and I'm listening to the Sweelinck fantasia
> right now and it's fantastic, a bit mesmerizing.
>
> The disc seems to be the one Sony released in the early 90's,
> which was once available in the states but has since been withdrawn.
>
> Great sound for live mono.
>
> Ahhh, I just moved the track onto the Mozart k 330, boy is our
> hero ever playing the first movement with a cute face,
> and a straight face for Gould's Mozart.
>
> Damn, what a concert that was.
>
> Here's a review of the disc from the gramophone site.
>
>
>
>
> 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 (which stands for Bryce Morrison, a critic I trust)
>