Iconoclastic takes on Romantic masterpieces that are at times infuriating, other times mesmerizing, often both. Recordings taken from CBC television transmissions from CBC Studios, Toronto...

Iconoclastic takes on Romantic masterpieces that are at times infuriating, other times mesmerizing, often both.

Recordings taken from CBC television transmissions from CBC Studios, Toronto on December 9th, 1970 and September lst-4th, 1967.

While most of us turn gratefully to music we cherish and admire, Glenn Gould often performed and even recorded music he despised. And reading his accompanying comments - an infuriating mix of brilliance and jargon, insight and psycho-babble - the omens are not good. "Whenever Chopin tackled large-scale forms and tried to write pieces demanding a high degree of organization he almost invariably came to grief." To illustrate his point Gould chooses the Third Sonata, anaesthetizes it and after "freezing up the heat of life" applies his surgeon's scalpel. Chopin's occasional flutter with a form of romantic polyphony (the start of the development of the first movement) momentarily engages his sympathy, but elsewhere the essentially vocal conception of keyboard writing and the ecstatic entwining of melody and counter-melody are clearly viewed as frivolous. The overall result is so literal and Teutonic that it left this listener, at least, stranded, gasping for air and longing to break Gould's stranglehold. His didacticism in the finale's exultant bravura is notably perverse and rarely have I heard a performance by a great pianist that more obviously declares his limitations.

Gould's Mendelssohn is scarcely less cramped (though he responds to the hymnal pieties of the Song without Words. op. 30 No. 3 with surprising warmth) but his Scriabin is, arguably, as mesmeric as it is strange. All listeners nurtured on an ultraromantic Russian tradition will jettison Gould's alternative and spring more than a few questions. Why so ponderous in the powerfully striding drammatico rhythm of the Third Sonata's opening? Since when is a languorous Andantino the same as Presto con allegrezza in the Fifth Sonata? From anyone else such things would be unacceptable. But from Gould you pause to reconvene, to reconsider and note that there is nothing random or inchoate about his conclusions. Both these performances, together with some wintry Prokofiev, hold a powerful and compelling fascination.

The final record contains a damp squib rather than a jeu d'esprit (the Strauss Burleske was another work that gave Gould heartache rather than joy) and a heavily personalized, monochrome Beethoven Emperor Concerto. Here, once again, are rhythms in the opening flourishes articulated like so much phonetic spelling and a deliberately poker-faced, uninflected response to the Adagio's espressivo. Conductor and orchestra fight to match their soloist's aggression but end sounding tubthumping and militaristic. Gould was, incidentally, a last-minute replacement in the Beethoven for the ever-indisposed Michelangeli, a situation that provoked the impish riposte from Gould, "My God, just think that the Number One pianist is going to substitute for Number Two". All these discs contain either previously unreleased material or first authorized issues.

-- Gramophone [4/1996]