Re: 450.000 listeners

[Bradley Lehman <bpl@umich.edu>]

At 10:51 AM 10/27/00 +0000, Jacqueline Colombier 
wrote:
> Bonjour F minor,
>
> Did you know that Maurane - a francophone singer- has sold 450.000
> albums
> with a song "Sur un prélude de Bach" (1991)which starts :
>            
> "Lorsque j'entends ce prélude de Bach
>              
> par Glen Gould ma raison s'envole"
> (...)
>   The prelude is the first one of the WTC, Book I. But
> why not write Glenn
> Gould as we all do ?

In the spirit of Monty Python's bookshop sketch:

Are you asking about the Canadian Glenn Gould who plays "Enoch Arden" by Richard Strauss, narrated by Claude Rains?  Or the noted Belgian harpsichordist Glen Gould who plays "Enoch Argon" by Richard Straus, with Claude Reins?  Or the Dutch organist Glenn Goold playing "Enoch Arddwyn" by the Welsh composer Richard Strwyss, with Clood Raans? 

And surely you don't mean "Eunuch Ardent" from our adult section.  That one's by Dick Garland and has vocals by the Invisible Woman.

-----

More seriously, here are excerpts of the program notes from the CD set of the WTC 1 played by Joao-Carlos Martins on Labor 7001-2:

Previously unknown work by reclusive twentieth-century master

Many of the most ambitious modern composers have produced long keyboard pieces that are designed to explore particular compositional ideas exhaustively.  (...)  The latest of these modern masterpieces is "Well-Tempered Clavier" (1988), an exhaustive keyboard work by the young German composer J. S. Bach, reportedly a recluse who has never before made his compositions publicly available.  (Rumor has it that since the composer uses only initials for first names, he may be a woman.  This mystery perhaps accounts for why Bach does not allow him/herself to be photographed and why his/her whereabouts are, like those of the American author Thomas Pynchon, always unknown.)  It should be made clear that this "Well-Tempered Clavier" is not the classic work incidentally of the same title, by an eighteenth-century composer with a similar name, but something else--a thoroughly contemporary composition, richly eclectic and challenging in the ways that only modern music can be.

This new Bach work was discovered by Joao Carlos Martins, the celebrated Brazilian pianist whose name is incidentally identical to that of a precocious keyboard player, deceased in the wake of a tragic sports accident, who recorded the classic work as a young man some twenty years ago. (...)

It has been speculated that this new "Well-Tempered Clavier", coming as it does from a composer who otherwise has no public existence, was actually written by the late Glenn Gould, the Canadian pianist, who until now was most successful at bringing Bach into the twentieth century.  There is no question that if Gould would have written piano music, he would have written something as audacious, well-proportioned and exhaustive.  There is no doubt in my mind, as Gould's sometime friend, that the composer of this contemporary "Well-Tempered Clavier" is someone else, this mysterious Mr./Ms. J. S. Bach and then that this is the sort of masterful music that many well-known modern composers would have sold their grandmothers to have written two minutes of. (...)  - Richard Kostelanetz


Bradley Lehman, Dayton VA
home: http://i.am/bpl or  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bpl
CD's: http://listen.to/bpl or http://www.mp3.com/bpl

"Music must cause fire to flare up from the spirit - and not only sparks from the clavier...." - Alfred Cortot