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Re: Gould/Chopin
This is from an interview on CBC Radio with Vincent Tovell.
Tovell: You don't find yourself wanting to play Chopin, for instance?
GG: No. No, I don't. I play it in a weak moment - maybe once a year or
twice a year for myself. But it doesn't convince. me.
GG went on to admit that Chopin certainly understood the piano. He said he
was an unparalleled setter of moods and as a miniaturist he was superb. He
felt Chopin failed "in the bigger things of music, in the real
organizational attempts, he failed almost altogether."
Remember, GG thought of himself as a musician not a pianist. The fact that
Chopin was the pianist's composer did not impress Glenn Gould.
Like the rest of us, GG had to learn Chopin when he was a student. From
what I have read, it sounds as though he had his fill of it then. He
mentioned playing Romantic music for student recitals.
Anne
----- Original Message -----
From: f h <boyboy_8@YAHOO.COM>
To: <F_MINOR@EMAIL.RUTGERS.EDU>
Sent: Monday, May 06, 2002 12:52 PM
Subject: Gould/Chopin
> I have long felt curious about his almost Chopin-less
> output. I am really only going to guess here, having
> not read what Gould said in print or interviews about
> his opinion. I have a somewhat love/disinterest in
> Chopin and always have. As a romantic poet of the
> piano, Chopin has expressed musical ideas which, at
> the best, are superb. At his worst, he sounds like a
> broken record. It's not so much that you can hear
> those chords coming like the proverbial train around
> the mountain, or you can see Chopin bringing his
> pieces to a conclusion as if he was strapped with
> crazy glue into the composers seat, fixed and fixated
> with the forms he had either created or developed. I
> think that Chopin suffers worse than say, Schubert,
> for a composer who had an opportunity to express
> himself from a wider pallet and lost track of this
> ambition and instead found himself almost sounding
> like a caraciture of himself. I know that this is a
> bit harsh, but after a few hours of listening to many
> Chopin pieces in a row, you will get a gist of what
> I'm getting at. Where other composers, especially
> Beethoven, searched for ever new forms and
> complexities to elaborate on, Chopin was quite happy
> showing you how many different ways that a heart could
> be worn on one's sleeve. Fine enough but there is
> much more to be said in music. He abandoned symphonic
> and chamber music expressions where he most certainly
> had the musical mind to explore these and other forms.
> All in all, perhaps, Gould felt a bit let down or
> even bored with Chopin, because from an intellectual
> point of view, or better put, from a contrapuntalists
> point of view, Gould might have felt that there was
> very little there in Chopin that needed exploring. As
> I say, it's just speculation on my part.
>
> Regards,
>
> Fred
>
>
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