Re: GG:At Home with GG, op 111

[Tim Conway <tpconway@ozemail.com.au>]

Eric Coates wrote:

>I can't wait to hear what GG did with this sonata. I assume the piece in 
>question is where the beautiful second movement suddenly, but following
>plenty of earlier subtle suggestion, breaks into what I first thought of 
>as Beethovenian ragtime. 
>About 10 years ago Bennetton (Italian garment manufacturer)ran a TV 
>commercial in the UK using this piece which, at the time I had just got 
>to know (otherwise I would have taken it to be a bit of Scott Joplin!)
>Maybe they'd got hold of GG's jazz version!?

This section of the arieta is often used in quizzes. As Eric would have 
done, most contestants hearing it for the first time go for Joplin as the 
composer.

I regret that the first CD I bought of op 111 was by Ivo Pogorelich. 
Leaving aside the rest of the opus, his rendition of the ragtime segment 
is jazzier than GG's. It really swings and syncopates, if that's not a 
contradiction in terms. Perhaps the _Glenn Gould at Home_ excerpt that 
Mary Jo talked about showed GG really jazzing it up, in contrast to the 
official recording where he might have decided to show more restraint.

Who knows? All I know is that I'd like to get my hands on a copy of the 
_Glenn Gould at Home_ CD.

BTW Eric: are you related to that other Eric Coates, composer of 'The 
Knightsbridge March', 'The Dambusters March' and other well-known light 
orchestral English pieces? Probably not, and you're probably sick of 
people asking but, as Kristen Immoor will confirm, we f-miners are 
seekers after truth no matter how trivial. And vice versa. Talking of 
which and being in a mood for name-dropping, I used (briefly) to know 
Austin Coates, EC's son, who lived in Hong Kong for many years. He wasn't 
a composer -- he wrote books instead, the piker.

Tim Conway
<tpconway@ozemail.com.au>