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Re: Celebrity Death Match: Brendel vs Gould

Ugh! Brendel obviously doesn't GET it. The Gould virus, I mean. Either you
get it or you don't, and once you get it you can't dismiss it the way
Brendel does so easily. I have all of the Beethoven piano sonatas as
recorded by Brendel on old records, and none of them have that creative
spark. Well that's not fair,really. Let's just say they never make me laugh
out loud for sheer delight and run over to the piano because I'm so excited.
           Elmer was saying in his post that it's impossible to know for
sure exactly how a piece should go if it was written before the time when
composers could record their pieces. If you think about it, it's kind of
nice really, because otherwise there would be no experimentation involved,
no creative individualism, maybe (GASP) no place for Glenn Gould. This is
also kind of scary, especially as you look around and see more and more
pianists who are unable to improvise, who are perhaps brilliant, and yet are
shown by their teachers that, "THIS is the way you play Bach, this is how
you play Mozart, no exceptions."(I think every classical pianist ought to
learn how to do jazz improv.)
            It is my personal opinion that there will be many more
Brendels, more Horowitzes, and maybe even more Rubinsteins(by the way, has
anyone read Glenn's Maude Harbor article or Variations on a Theme by
Rubinstein? Hilarious!), but there will only be one Gould. (I know that's
sort of a cliche on this list , but hey!)
           Anne C.
P.S. Sorry Elmer, but I think you're going to get this messege twice. I'm
quite technologically impaired.


From: Elmer Elevator <bobmer.javanet@RCN.COM>
Reply-To: Elmer Elevator <bobmer.javanet@RCN.COM>
To: F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU
Subject: Celebrity Death Match: Brendel vs Gould
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2002 15:32:29 -0400

Wie gehts Arne, hiya Sarah!

rant snort fume ...

Does this Brendel guy have JS Bach's phone number? Does he chat with Bach
about Bach's interpretive wishes?

Some composers are just thrilled that ANY artist wants to give their
compositions a whack, interpreted any way the artist likes. Charles Ives
refused to copyright any of his compositions and got very testy if a
pianist tried to pump him for details about the "proper" way to play his
stuff.

Doubtless many other composers reside at the opposite end of the spectrum.
They wrote it This Way, and every artist better damn perform it This Way.

The trouble with that, for composers who lived before Edison or even the
Player Piano (circa 1830), is that it's extremely difficult to extract a
composer's precise interpretive intentions from sheet music. There's tempo,
which will have a precise  numerical specification. But the nuances of
syncopation, of ebb and flow from passage to passage ... before recording
technology, these are impossible to rediscover or recover.

One or two of the keyboard artists whose performances were preserved on the
Weldt recording piano circa 1910 trace their teacher-pupil lineage directly
to Mozart and Bach, and a good scholarly claim can be made that these
modern recordings retain important vestiges of the 17th- and 18th-century
composers' interpretive wishes -- their "rules."

But that's really a stretch that's very difficult if not impossible to
support.

So I think Brendel on Gould's interpretations is Way Off Base. I think
we're just reading the grumblings of a very very nit-picky man who imagines
that he has some Superior Hotline to the True Interpretive Wishes of Bach.
We have only the vaguest, fuzziest ideas how JS Bach played JS Bach, what
it actually sounded like. We will just never know whether Gould was very
close to JSB's interpretive wishes, or whether Gould is really dangerously,
criminally hostile to the composer's wishes.

Play this stuff any damn way you think it's supposed to go. Your heart and
your ears and your wallet will sort it out.

Elmer / Bob

-----Original Message-----
From: Arne Klindt <a.klindt@GMX.NET>
To: F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU <F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Sunday, August 18, 2002 3:12 PM
Subject: Gould vs Horowitz / Brendel vs Gould


<unlurk>

Sarah Meneses was sad to find

>that
>most pianists contemporary to Gould, and some from older generations
>didn't mention him at all, or if they did, they had together with him a
>negative idea, like the way he moves or sings when playing.

Alfred Brendel says in a book of collected interviews /w Martin Meyer:

"To me Gould was the prime example of what an interpreting artist must not
be; he was an eccentric doing everything possible to counteract the wishes
or the character of the composer. There is innumerable evidence for this.
Sometimes he did this by exposing one or two aspects of the piece while
ignoring others."

"Glenn Gould made up his own rules - the word rules is not correct here I
find. Obsessions were the guidelines along which he performed and which
make his recordings seem so uniform in the way Gould treats the composers.
I have attended concerts, I have listened to recordings."

"I have always asked myself: This man is so gifted, why does he mistreat
composers so terribly? It seems to me that quite many people love this kind
of sadism (...) You can play pieces in many different ways, but - if you
please - within the limits, within the character and the structure of the
piece itself. Gould crosses these limits voluntarily, or he does not notice
them. Something inside him is at cross angles to the pieces he plays.
Apparently this seems very attractive to many people. It makes me mad
sometimes."

Taken from
"Alfred Brendel - Ausgerechnet ich"  [translates as: I of all people ;-)]
Carl Hanser Verlag, München Wien
ISBN 3-446-20001-0

Translation by me

Arne

</unlurk>

Remail: Original Timestamp: sometime in April 01





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