More about GG & Chopin

[Kristen Immoor <kimmoor@mindspring.com>]

A bit more fuel for the fire, excerpted from The Washington Post, Sunday,
March 22, 1998 "Book World: Divas And Virtuosos" by our old pal Tim Page.

Alone among the great pianists, Glenn Gould actively disliked
Chopin's music and he recorded only one work -- a blunt, brusque, icy
cold performance of the Sonata in B Minor, Op. 58, that smacks of
parody. Gould himself admitted that he had "done his worst" to the
piece. Kevin Bazzana, in his fine new book, Glenn Gould: The Performer
in the Work, makes no defense of this recording -- it "certainly
offers little insight into Chopin" -- but he does explore, with rare
acuity, Gould's artistic philosophies and the manner in which they
were put into practice. Bazzana is the editor of Glenn Gould, an
unusually engaging musical journal, and his prose, while technical and
undoubtedly challenging for the lay reader, yields up its secrets to
careful scrutiny.

According to Bazzana, Gould "treated all scores as if they had
been written by Bach, as collections of pitches and rhythms with no
firm guidelines as to how they were to be realized in performance."
This is a splendid insight into Gould's method, although, on paper,
such an interpretive approach strikes me as both limited and misguided
in the extreme.

But who can argue with the best of Gould's magnificent and
idiosyncratic performances? The pianist was nothing if not
paradoxical: "His Bach playing was often much freer than that of many
earlier Romantic pianists, who tended to play Bach reverently,
literally, dryly," Bezzana writes. "Gould's Bach sarabandes were more
beautiful, more colorful, more expressive, more 'Romantic,' even more
'pianistic' than his Chopin sonata." Bezzana examines Gould's
contradictions with a judicious mixture of sympathy andrigor. His
book may be set beside Geoffrey Payzant's Glenn Gould: Music and Mind,

Peter Ostwald's Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius and the
pianist's own writings as a valuable complement to Gould's recording
legacy.

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"Those are terrible people who don't like Glenn Gould. 
...I will have nothing to do with such people, they are dangerous people."

                                  -- Thomas Bernhard