Re: guillou's goldberg's on organ

[Bradley Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

At 02:18 PM 7/8/2000 -0700, Jim Morrison wrote:
> Has anyone heard this recording?   It's the first I've heard of the
> Goldbergs being recorded on an organ.  Sounds like a project Gould would
> have liked.
>
> Bach: The Goldberg Variations / Jean Guillou

Guillou is a quirky player - quite interesting.

Kate van Tricht also did a recording of the Goldbergs on organ, using her
teacher Karl Straube's edition from the 1920's (or was it 1930's?).  A big
romantic performance, quite nice.  That was on MD+G.

Incidentally there's also been at least one recording of the WTC complete
on organ: Louis Thiry, Arion 468306 (recorded in the early 1970's).

Scholar Robert Marshall argues strongly that the Toccatas BWV 910-916 are
organ works, and indeed they work well that way.

> And here's another question for any harpsichord specialist out there.  Just
> what did Gould have done to his harpsichord to get it to sound so awful on
> his recording of the Handel Suites?  I've never heard a harpsichord sound
> anything like that; it's so 'rubbery' at times.

Well, that Wittmayer he used was not a good harpsichord to begin with.  Its
tone is profoundly uninteresting....

And GG didn't have any harpsichord technique...he beat on that thing with a
heavy touch (and that brutality is picked up by the close miking).  He
claimed in an interview that the Wittmayer was the only type of harpsichord
he could play, because its action was so heavy (i.e. the action felt
relatively close to a piano's).  He admitted he did all his practicing for
that Handel album on the piano, not the harpsichord.  He worked out the
registrations movement by movement during the sessions.  So, GG wasn't
playing it taking it seriously as a harpsichord (even as a bad
harpsichord), but rather as a generic keyboard.  It's sort of analogous to
the way he wished his piano was a harpsichord.  Huh.

Then he also used the buff stop very extensively.  This is a mechanism that
presses tiny cubes or triangles of leather against the strings to inhibit
the resonance.  It's a special effect that some harpsichords have, a
novelty.  It's generally not used much: it takes away the player's
sensitivity to note releases, and chokes all the high overtones out of the
tone.  That buff stop is the "rubbery" effect you're referring to.  It
really does make that Wittmayer sound as if the strings are made of rubber
rather than metal.

So then GG complained that the Wittmayer didn't have a buff stop on the
four-foot set of strings (the octave-higher set) as well!  The reason
builders don't put one there is: a buff stop on a four-foot register would
sound awfully silly, negating the usefulness of that set of strings.  It's
like Steven Wright's joke about putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier in
a room together and letting them fight it out.

How can I put all this in a positive light, GG being our hero and
all?  'Cause it's hard to put into polite words how horrible that *@#*&@#%
unlistenable record sounds, and the problem is not in the
engineering.  Let's just say that his use of that Wittmayer gives his
Handel recording an intriguingly neutral tone color, and this lets us focus
on his interpretive ideas rather than the sound of the instrument.  That
record is maybe what GG's thoughts sound like in battleship grey (his
favorite color).


Bradley Lehman
Dayton VA
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl