Pianist Gould Eccentric, As Usual

The Glenn Gould Legacy, Vol. III

Music of Wagner, Brahms, Grieg, R. Strauss and Sibelius

Glenn Gould, piano

CBS Masterworks

Three Records

In many quarters, the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982) is remembered mainly for his personal eccentricity. Gould's quirks are legendary: he played in a chair so low his face was only inches from the keyboard, never gave a public concert after the early 1960s (he thought listening to music should be a solitary experience), and wore winter jackets in the heat of summer.

But if Gould was a bizarre person, his many recordings also show him as a brilliant, unusual musician with spectacular digital agility. Best known for his Bach interpretations (he recorded all of Bach's solo keyboard works), Gould almost never played the music of Romantic composers like Chopin, Liszi and Rachmaninoff, whose compositions are the bread and butter of so many virtuosos.

It is surprising, then, that CBS decided to re-release Gould recordings of Romantic-era music as the third volume of its ongoing Glenn Gould Legacy series. (The first two volumes contain music of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn; a fourth, of 20th century works, will be released in September.) The assortment of music on this three-record set, released last month, is very odd for a Romantic piano music collection: three sonatinas by Jean Sibelius, an obscure sonata by Richard Strauss, two transcriptions by Gould of highlights from Wagner operas, and more conventional repertoire by Brahms and Grieg.

If this collection of pieces seems strange, so do Gould's performances. The actual sound of Gould's piano is quite unusual (the only piano he played for recordings sounds like it's one-quarter harpsichord), as is his approach to these pieces. Gould's renditions--with generally slow tempos, accentuated inner voices, and understated pedalling--seem a deliberate attempt to fly in the face of the norms of "Romantic" virtuoso pianism.

But the unusualness of these recordings, which span from Gould's early career (1960) to one month before he died (1982), does not mean that they're not fascinating, and sometimes even beautiful. It does mean, however, that this set is worth buying only if you either love Gould's playing, or want to listen to little-known piano music of Sibelius and Strauss.

A whole record is devoted to Brahms' music, which makes him the most-represented composer in the set: 10 Intermezzi and the Rhapsody in B-minor, Op. 79. The Intermezzi (recorded in 1960) are certainly interesting to listen to, for Gould does some unusual things bringing out the pieces' many inner voices (in the famous B-flat minor, Op. 117, for example). He captures the autumnal quality of these short, profoundly simple pieces. Unfortunately, though, his overly ponderous tempos sometimes lack for dynamic and rhythmic drive. The filler on the disk, the tulmultuous Rhapsody (recorded in 1982), was surely the highlight of Gould's second and final Brahms album, and the same is true here.

Grieg's E-minor sonata is the set's only other piece in the standard repertoire. (In his liner notes reprinted from the original 1973 release Gould, with typical humor, claims that his rendition of the sonata should be considered as definitive because his maternal grandmother was Grieg's cousin.) The same can be said of Gould's performance of the Grieg sonata as of the Brahms' Intermezzi: he emphasizes inner (detractors would say "extraneous") voices, and takes unusually slow tempos. Still, taken on its own terms, the sonata is musically coherent and surprisingly lyrical, especially the Andante Molto second movement, which resembles more than faintly the slow movement of the composer's celebrated A-minor concerto.

minor sonata, Op. 5 (written when the composer was a mere 16 years old), recorded in 1982, Gould's incredibly clear playing is matched with appropriately fast tempos in the outer movements, and with a beautiful, singing melody line in the Adagio cantabile.

Gould's Wagner transcriptions (recorded in 1973), taken from the operas Die Meistersinger and Gotterdammerung, make for fun listening. Gould has added lots of counterpoint to the original orchestral score (in order to play all voices in the Meistersinger Prelude, Gould had to dub one take over another). In Gould's able hands Sibelius's sonatinas (recorded in 1976-7), short, sparsely-written works, receive as good a performance as they are likely ever to have on records.