RE: [F_minor] Something Old and Something Blue/Grey

["Houpt, Fred" <fred.houpt@rbc.com>]

On another topic I meant to write about, in last months BBC Music Mag is
a cover article/interview with Angela Hewitt.  Something she said about
GG just made me cringe.  She said that she could never understand
Gould's technique because it was just too crazy.  Crazy?  A day or so
before reading this I listened in rapt joy as I enjoyed once again GG's
recording of Elizabethan composers.  Crazy technique?  The reason no one
else tries this music is because they don't know what to do with it.
They have to achieve a sense of unity with the times, modes and thinking
of that era.  Gould was able to do so because his mind on some levels
was so free to explore and because his technique was elastic enough to
adapt to different musical periods.  

I am not slagging Hewitt as a performer; she is excellent.  But GG was
not possessed of a crazy technique, just one that was perfectly suited
to his vivid imagination and awesome intellect.  Even Hewitt has missed
this and frankly I am totally sick and tired of hearing how people put
GG's technique to the torch when they should be paying closer attention
to the light he shines to the inner realms of meaning that most don't
even know are there. No one will argue that he often took eccentric
approaches to speed but there is not a pianist alive today who could
make a musical line sing with such balanced clarity as GG could and in
any genre he played.  That alone for me makes all of his technique worth
putting up with.  

Kind regards,

Fred Houpt
Toronto
[snip]
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