Re: Ives Concord + Bartok

[jerry and judy <jerbidoc@zianet.com>]

>On Tue, 3 Aug 1999, John Hill wrote:
>
>> GG generally avoided music of a bombastic, showy nature and seems
>> to have been drawn primary to contrapuntal works whose structures
>> could be used as a jumping off point for individual interpretation.  He
>> did *speak* of Ives from time to time, but seems not to have been very
>> drawn to his music.  Same thing with Bartok, but perhaps for different
>> reasons.
>
>I too wonder why GG avoided Bartok, whose piano music is brilliantly
>well-crafted.  It's contrapuntally sound, clever, and ingenious; rarely
>bombastic or showy.  There are also theorists who have built analytical
>careers on Bartok's use of form, proportion, phrase structure, and motivic
>construction (anybody here go through a university music theory curriculum
>*without* analyzing some Bartok?).  All this would seem to be right up
>GG's alley.  Bartok was also a particularly refined pianist in
>interpreting his own and others' works, as his recordings show.
>
>Did GG perhaps ignore Bartok because BB tended to be a progressive
>adventurer, while GG was generally more drawn to the musical conservatives
>and reactionaries?  Or perhaps because Bartok was non-Germanic?
>
>Speaking of non-Germanic composers who were into ethnomusicological
>collection and arrangement, I wish GG had played more Grieg, too.  There
>at least GG claimed some kinship.
>
>How about GG tackling the Barber sonata with its fugal last movement?
>That too seems a natural GG piece that he didn't play.  If he wanted to
>"out-Horowitz Horowitz," why didn't he take him on in this sonata instead
>of the Prokofiev 7?  (In the Barber GG could have also directly challenged
>his own contemporary, Van Cliburn, while he was at it.  VC and VH both did
>marvelous recordings of this piece.)
>
>Or he could have gone after both VH and Richter by giving us a version of
>the Mussorgsky Pix, in his own meta-Horowitzed transcription, throwing in
>some overdubbing of contrapuntal parts derived from Ravel....
>
>Bradley Lehman ~ http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl/
>Dayton, VA, USA ~ 38.43N+78.98W



I think, if there can be one answer to this it would be (for me) that GG
always (in recordings at least) chose pieces that he thought he could play
impressively (maybe better than other performances that he had heard) and
also those pieces which he could interpret in his own way (pieces that were
already well represented in the catalog, but which obviously hadn't been
played with his points of emphasis). :)  I think he greatly succeeded in
this in his late Haydn and his Schoenberg and Hindemith.  I love his Byrd
etc. recordings, but I understand what's 'missing' from that 'music', I
don't even think of it as him playing composers of that time, I drift into
this fantasy in which Gould has just found the scores in a basement
somewhere and played them 'cold' without any 'reference(s)'!  Weird!

A great deal of his Mozart and Beethoven is less successful because of the
difficult self-imposed visions he had for these sonatas, and IMO, only the
very early works in both cases are malleable enough?

His Bach is just inspired, what can I say?, but it fits 'his pattern' of
requiring a type of 'virtuosity' and *freedom*.  He was fearless!

As for Bartok and Barber, heh heh, maybe he didn't think he could excel
over VH and VC et. al.   Their 'romantic' style of playing could be easily
bested, even in Brahms!, according to what I think GG would say, but what
would he do along those lines in BB and SB?  heh hehee!

Thanks for making me think, Dr. L,
Does any of this make sense?
Jerry