Summary
Canadian pianist who died in 1982 at the age of fifty, who established himself through an extraordinarily distinctive identity, launched his career with a stunning recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, left the recital stage in 1964, and, in everything he did, expressed dissatisfaction with piano playing as such — his project an attempt to connect pianism with the larger society (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.220-221, 226).
Details
- Andras Schiff said of Gould that “he could control five voices more intelligently than most [pianists] can control two.” (quoted PDF p.220).
- One of the last records he made was still another Goldberg interpretation, very different from the earlier one and yet patently the work of the same pianist; his Bach playing caused a seismic shift in ideas about performance, and a string of pianists influenced by him — Schiff, Peter Serkin, Joao Carlos Martins, Charles Rosen, Alexis Weissenberg — became known for performing the Goldberg Variations (PDF p.220-221).
- He played every piece as if X-raying it, rendering each component with independence and clarity; he never contented himself with the expected repertory, and, declaring he didn’t like Mozart, proceeded to record all his sonatas at exaggerated speeds and with unlovely inflections (PDF p.221).
- In programming he was a genius, revealing new meanings and connections, as when he linked Bach and Richard Strauss, or Sweelinck and Hindemith (PDF p.222).
- Gould seemed actually to invent himself and his playing, as if he had no antecedents, and seemed to be the embodiment of Thomas Mann’s Adrian Leverkuhn (as printed, PDF p.227, 229).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Maurizio Pollini, Contrapuntalism