Re: GG plays Byrd & Gibbons

[Alun Severn <alun@ukiah.demon.co.uk>]

Richard,

[...]
>There's a special kind of passion, especially in
>Gibbons' Italian Ground and Byrd's Sixth Pavan and Galliard (Kinborough
>Good). [...]

The Italian Ground is revelatory -- GG at his most ecstatic, inward,
entranced: qualities I thought only existed in GG's finest Bach recordings.
Listening to the Italian Ground last night I had the same feeling as when I
first heard GG -- the feeling that this was not only amazing piano playing,
but a fiercely intelligent performance which (as I have read somewhere of
GG's Bach playing) defies you to question its style or aesthetic...

>Maybe Gould rarely performed Gibbons in public because Gibbons was one of
>the few things he could keep private.

There is also a kind of intense privacy about this music, even more so than
in GG's Bach. The Gibbons compares with the late recordings GG made of the
Little Preludes and fughettas, the miniatures that he re-recorded in the
last years of his life...you *just* know that he had found something
special in this music...

Rgds,  Alun

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