Glenn Gould in Concert, 1951-1960

Gould in Concert, 1951-1960. West Hill Radio Archives WHRA-6038 (6 CDs). This set is self-recommending, even essential, for anyone interested in developing a comprehensive understanding of the artistry of Gould. It contains live or radio performances that have (with few exceptions) never previously circulated on official Sony or CBC releases, and it features a large swath of significant Gould repertory. The accessible, authoritative, and insightful booklet note by Kevin Bazzana, dean of Gould scholarship (French-and German-reading buyers, by contrast, get only the Wikipedia article on Gould in their language), provides a fine overview of Gould's career, at least insofar as that is important for understanding how these particular performances fit into it, and mentions any important ways in which these performances differ from official recordings. Bazzana frankly states that Glenn Gould would have hated this release, and there can be no doubt that the occasional finger slips that can be found here alter to some marginal extent the idealized impression that Gould's commercial recordings create; if one is so inclined, Gould allows one to feel that his recording studio music-making involves pure play of mind released from the constraints of materiality. But the playing to be heard here is nevertheless awesomely impressive from a variety of perspectives, and the combination of these recordings and Bazzana's essay will provide countless hours of enjoyment and stimulation. End of review. How, then, given that Bazzana's essay sheds more specific light on the context and distinctive features of these performances than I could offer here, can I provide additional insights without being utterly redundant? Perhaps the best way will be to back up a step and see these recordings not so much in terms of how they fit into Gould's world as in terms of how the artistry they reveal fits in with piano playing of the 1950s: how, in hindsight, do these performances and Gould's playing in general seem traditional, path-breaking, or (to use words often encountered in evaluating Gould) eccentric or iconoclastic? The mismatch with the style prevalent in his era becomes particularly obvious in certain performances involving orchestra or other performers. There is clearly positive energy going on in Gould's collaborations with Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra--I have never heard a more seamless conclusion to the cadenza in the first movement of Bach's Fifth Brandenburg Concerto, for example, and there is some loving orchestral playing in Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto--but the rapid, tight vibrato in the string playing (especially that of fellow soloist Misha Mishakoff) makes Gould's highly articulated style seem to come from a different planet. On a strictly technical level, the recording balance that emerges in some recordings also seems dated. For example, Gould's playing in this recording of Schoenberg's Das Buch der hangenden Garten sounds recessed and merely fluent next to the plummy, spotlit sound of mezzo-soprano Kerstin Meyer--he would presumably have been given more prominence a decade or two further along, and we would have been the beneficiaries. And it must also be said that there is occasional raggedness from his partners (the horns go astray in the opening tutti of the Brahms First Piano Concerto in this 1959 performance with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra). On more fundamental grounds, too, Gould can at times seem to be running against the current. I was especially taken by his treatment of Variation IV in the last movement of Beethoven's Sonata, Op. 109 (an unfortunate misprint in booklet and on box suggests that this piece is in E-flat major rather than the correct E major). Artur Schnabel was one of the first to propose in his Beethoven playing that passages with certain kinds of quick-moving figuration could have unsuspected melodic significance (his position on this soon became extremely influential), and Beethoven's tempo instruction for this variation (etwas langsamer, als das Thema) would seem to make such treatment a real possibility in this passage. …

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