Glenn Gould | Richibi's Weblog

a degustation

“Lemons“ (1929)

___________

watching one of my cooking competition
shows on television the other day, the
twelve contestants were called upon in
pairs to create, each couple, one of the
six elements in a degustation menu

a degustation menu – I raised an eyebrow
at that one – is the same as a tasting menu,
but at a finer, it is implied, restaurant

the theme was citrus fruit, each service
had to highlight one of them, a mandarin,
a lemon, an orange, a lime, a tangelo,
a grapefruit, in that order

my goodness, I thought, a set of
variations on edibles, I was delighted,
not to mention synesthetically
titillated, all my senses were alive

the first course was a mandarin-cured
prawn ceviche, with pesto, something
to tease one’s palate, leaving plenty of
room, however, for what was to follow,
the second course, an equally light
lemon-cured salmon with smoked
crème fraîche and decorative
translucent radish slices, in again but
polite allotments

the third service introduces the protein,
duck with the nearly ever requisite
orange, but with beets, in this instance,
on an underlying sheen of all their
accumulated and colourful juices,
bread, I would imagine, would’ve been
gluttonously required

beef then followed, to fill the second
of the more substantial and filling
elements of the meal, with a lime
reduction and beets

for dessert, the fifth service presented
a tangelo cup with a surprise chocolate
truffle meant to burst in one’s mouth
with iced tangelo flavour, refreshing
and unexpectedly delightful, followed
by a grapefruit sorbet with chocolate
ganache and meringue shards as a
finale

not all contestants reached the heights
wished for, but some were memorable,
much as in any set of, even noteworthy,
variations

here’s Glenn Gould playing Beethoven’s
Six Variations in F major, Opus 34, each
variation is comparable to a culinary
experience, but for piano

listen, compare

these are preceded here by a late, and
haunting, Beethoven bagatelle, his
Opus 126, however, after which the
variations themselves are conveniently
spliced in the editing process to help
distinguish each movement from the
other

Glenn Gould doesn’t hit a note wrong,
but I think Beethoven’s introductory
aria, upon which the variations are
built, and which is repeated at the end
after a coda, or final interpolated wave,
is slow, a more engaging opening
would’ve been, to my mind, more
effective

I also would’ve, however peripherally,
degusted especially the lime beef

R ! chard

psst: incidentally, all Bach’s Cello Suites
are in six segments, their common
theme is dance, each one is a
scintillating Baroque example

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July 6, 2018

Piano Sonata no 17, opus 31, no 2 “The Tempest” – Beethoven

“Tempest on the Northern Sea“ (1865)

Ivan Aivazovsky

__________

for Judy, who “glimpses“, she says,
“a kinder world, that [my] missives
provide” – thank you, Judy

just as I was being called on the
carpet for my constant returns to
Beethoven, none other than Glenn
Gould should show up, in my
cavern of wonders, to absolve me,
or at least to stand stolidly by my
side

let him talk

had I written, however, his
observations, I’m sure you’d’ve
balked, he’s a product, after all,
of the priggish pretensions that
prevailed in my neck of the woods
at the time, Southern Ontario, a
product of British Imperialism,
of which I am myself, I avow,
incontrovertibly subject, but due
to the strength of his celebrity,
one is likely to listen to Gould
more attentively, I’m not
sufficiently yet, I suspect,
significant, nor influential

he is, one way or the other, I concur,
absolutely right

about his “Tempest“, though, I’ll say,
even object, as Stravinsky and John
Cage did, according to Gould, about
the commanding Beethoven, that
Gould is dripping in Romantic
sentiment here, his rubato in the
first movement tests the limits of
our forbearance, and his second
movement is so slow as to have
one fall off the page

but his last movement, the allegretto,
is brilliant

Gould’s idiosyncratic, dare I say,
eccentric, performance will
throughout, nevertheless,
astonish, indeed electrify, even,
I’m sure, inspire, watch, listen

and thanks ever, especially, for
dropping by

R ! chard

psst: here’s another version of the 17th,
  to my mind, less self-indulgent, but
you be the judge, don’t think about
it, just ask yourself which one
  would you want to hear a next time,
  that’ll be your, gloriously personal,
  reply

enjoy

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July 5, 2018

Piano Concerto no. 9 – Mozart

“Clown with Flowers“ (1963)

Marc Chagall

_______

with the greatest respect for all
who read me, and especially
for those who are least
convinced, the way also,
I note, to a conscious,
and entirely personal,
aesthetic

let me once again insist that my
commentaries here are not at all
the last word on any of what I’ve
discussed, they’ve been merely
my opinion, according to my own
particular aesthetic, my comments
have been rather to excite curiosity
about, for some, an esoteric topic,
to awaken interest in a field, to my
mind, strewn with marvels, and
never to dictate, art, as I often
remind, is in the eye of the
beholder

I think of myself as company in
an art gallery, viewing a
succession of works, musical
here, expressing notions, either
specifically to do with the exhibit,
or, personal, but somehow related,
then moving on, just enough to
whet the appetite, or, of course,
not

here’s an instance

I’d been waiting for the sales clerk
to box some fresh pasta for me I
was buying at an eatery down the
street when a line of piped in music
from their overhead system swept
me off my disconcerted feet, which
I recognized to be Mozart, but as
I’d never heard him, ever

can you tell me who’s playing that,
I asked the cashier, many stores
played their own tapes back then,
some still indeed even do,
19-eighty, at that time, something

he replied, Mitsuko Uchida
what she’d done was to not stress
the bar line, the natural beat, to,
in fact, eliminate it, so that a flight
of notes went on like an unfettered
and iridescent miracle, prompted
by its own irrepressible momentum,
I was flabbergasted

Beethoven later on would do that
nearly consistently

where Glenn Gould would remove
his foot from the sustain pedal to
channel Bach while he played
Beethoven, an atavism, Mitsuko
Uchida was reversing the process
and using Beethoven‘s own
unleashing of rhythms to shed
light on her Classically otherwise
bound Mozart, a telling
anachronism, I nearly screamed

here, in the event, is the next work
of musical art in my idiosyncratic
gallery, the richibi galleri, I call it,
Mitsuko Uchida herself illuminating
gloriously, as ever, Mozart, his
splendid, as she reminds us, Piano
Concerto no 9

thanks so much for stopping by

ever

R ! chard

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July 3, 2018

Piano Concerto no. 5, opus 73, “Emperor” – Beethoven

“All About Eve“ (1950)

_______

while I’m on the subject of concertos,
there’s one concerto that cannot be
overlooked, the very epitome of
concerti, their summit, apex, their
very pinnacle, Olympus, compared
to other less mighty compositions,
Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto,
the piece I would take with me to a
desert island, I used to even walk
along the seashore in the privacy of
my headphones nights, after dinner,
taking in its cadences, its wisdom,
under the moon, the stars, along
the, however temperamental,
ocean waters, transported

indeed this very version of it, Glenn
Gould’s, Beethoven’s, in my mind,
oracular equal

Beethoven made literature out of
music, progressed to the point of
delivering a very philosophy,
Gould took the prevailing
Romantic aesthetic of the time,
Arthur Rubinstein being a prime
example, for instance, and gave
us the music of the Information
Age, the mathematical precision
of computers, people could hear
it, perhaps not even knowing how,
why

briefly, Gould eschews – Gesundheit –
the hold pedal, the sustain pedal, on
the piano, he’d grown up on Bach,
made him his specialty, but Bach
had no sustain pedal on his
harpsichord, Gould transferred this
process to later, more rhythmically
malleable, works, making obvious
thereby their inner workings,
something like reading blueprints,
his interpretations give us the bare,
and revelatory, bones of these later
masterpieces, without the sometimes
facile effects of Romanticism, think
of rubato, for instance, the ability to
stretch a note, not possible on the
harpsichord, but often overused in
Romantic renderings, a cheap trick,
like paintings on velvet

Gould would have none of that, he
shows you the composer’s
compositional brilliance, without
fanfare, just the facts, no pedal,
which at the time was completely
revolutionary, much like computer
science was then, and algorithms

here’s something else about Gould,
more savoury, maybe, he was called
in at the last minute to perform this
piece when the planned pianist, of
considerable renown, wasn’t able to
make it, Gould hadn’t played it in a
number of years, but showed up the
next morning to deliver, the rest is,
as they say, history

that’s “All About Eve“ up there, but
for pianists, Glenn Gould is Eve
Harrington, though without her
predatory instincts, nobody now
remembers the other pianist,
unless you were there, interested,
listening, piano’s Margo Channing,
even if I named him, however
consummately accomplished he
might’ve been, a man I profoundly
admire, remains, cruelly, essentially
unremembered

imagine

R ! chard

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May 25, 2018

32 Variations in C Minor, WoO.80 – Beethoven

“Variations in Violet and Grey – Market Place“ (1885)

James McNeill Whistler

___________

strolling through my virtual musical park
today, in, indeed, the very merry month
of May, I was taken by surprise by, nearly
tripped over, in fact, a Beethoven work,
written in the very year, 1806, of the
“Razumovsky”s

I’d overlooked it cause it is without an
opus number, is listed, therefore, as
WoO.80, and is, consequently, easily
lost in the wealth of Beethoven’s
more prominently identified pieces,
but it is utterly miraculous, I think,
and entirely indispensable

I’d said something about it in an earlier
text, back when I was somewhat more
of a nerd, it would appear, perhaps even
a little inscrutable, though it’s
nevertheless, I think, not uninformative,
you might want to check it out, despite
its platform difficulties

the 32 Variations in C Minor are shorter,
at an average of 11 minutes, than Chopin’s
“Minute Waltz”, relatively, a variation every
half minute, where Chopin’s nevertheless
magical invention takes twice that to
complete its proposition

but in this brief span of time, this more
or less 11 minutes, Beethoven takes
you to the moon and back

a few things I could add to my earlier
evaluation, could even be reiterating,
Beethoven in his variations explores a
musical idea, turns it in every which
direction, not much different from what
he does in the individual movements of
his string quartets, his trios, his
symphonies, concertos and sonatas,
with their essential themes, motives,
they’re all – if you’ll permit an idea I got
from Paganini’s “Caprices” – cadenzas,
individual musings inspirationally
extrapolated, which, be they for
technical brilliance, or for a yearning
for a more spiritual legacy, set the
stage for a promise of forthcoming
excellence

this dichotomy will define the
essential bifurcated paths of the
musical industry, during, incidentally,
the very Industrial Revolution, their
mutual history, confrontation, for the
centuries to follow, which is to say,
their balance between form and
function, style versus substance,
Glenn Gould versus Liberace, say,
or Chopin, Liszt

before this, it’d been the more
sedate, less assertive evenings at
the Esterházys, to give you some
perspective, mass markets were
about to come up, not least in the
matter of entertainment

Beethoven was, as it were, already
putting on a show

R ! chard

psst: these alternate “Variations” put you in
the driver’s seat, a pilot explains the
procedures, it’s completely absorbing,
insightful, listen

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March 6, 2018

String Quartet in F major, opus 77, no 2 – Joseph Haydn

“Masked Harlequin Violinists“ (1944)

Ossip Zadkine

________

the Opus 77, no 2, of Haydn is the last
full string quartet of his, his very last
remaining unfinished, the Opus 103,
written in 1803

Haydn died in 1809, the Opus 77, no 2
was composed in 1799, he would’ve
been 67

but by then, he had established the
form that music would take for the
next over two hundred years

call, response, and recapitulation is
the house that Haydn built, and verily
cemented, you can hear it in our own
period’s “Love Me Tender“, for
instance, if you’ll also permit me here
its irresistible elaboration, to today’s
top hits, like my own most recent
favourite such contemporary iteration,
released in 2014, “Photograph“

we could be listening otherwise to
Bach right now, counterpoint,
fugues, intricate, linear music,
however powerfully transcendental,
instead of recurring music, call,
response, as I said, and
recapitulation, something like how
a clock works

but already Haydn is testing the
waters, in the Opus 77, no 2, the
andante, a step up from an adagio,
is in third place, something we
haven’t heard before, and not, to
my mind, especially effective, like
his mixture of tempos in the Opus
54, no 2, which was disconcerting,
however masterfully resolved we
find those to be in this very Opus
77, no 2, notably in the second
movement’s “Minuet, Presto – Trio”,
where the tempo change is nearly
imperceptible

art works on contravention, but
the affronts are to established
conventions, which are very
hard to overturn

watch Haydn here continue to
do just that, for better or for
worse

R ! chard

psst: listen to Bach here, incidentally,
  put his largo, or slow movement,
right where he wants to, at the
  very top of the bill, does it work,
  you tell me, a trivial pursuit,
  you’ll ask, I say not, you are
  defining your own aesthetic
  sensibility, something
  profoundly, I think, important,
who it is, with perspective, you
want to be

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August 11, 2017

threnodies: to the victims of Hiroshima, of the Holocaust, and to the Canadian North

“The Scream“ (1893)

Edvard Munch

____________

before we leave too far behind the
anniversary of the annihilation of
Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, let me
introduce you to a piece that
purports to pay it homage

if I didn’t bring it up before, it’s
because the date was wrong, but
especially because the work
offends me, the only thing I like
about it is the title, a thing of
beauty, poetry – Threnody to the
Victims of Hiroshima – a threnody
is a song of lamentation for the
dead, which worked for me, this
one, no further than its title

there is nothing remotely
reminiscent of the tragedy
throughout the piece, it is a
collection of academic exercises,
pretensions, I think, without a
heartbeat

let me compare Steve Reich’s
threnody to the victims of the
Holocaust, the other signature
Twentieth Century atrocity, his
“Different Trains“, a work in three
movements, “America – Before the
War”, “Europe – During the War”,
and “After the War”, for string
quartet and tape, upon which
Reich has recorded interviews
with people relating impressions
from before the war, during, and
after, according to the movements

the quartet, you’ll note, must keep
time with the tape, and in this
production visuals have been
effectively added

Glenn Gould had done something
like this several years earlier,
incidentally, in his “The Idea of
North“, a threnody itself to that
very idea, a masterpiece, a
groundbreaking transcendental
work of the imagination, with
overlapping voices, which is to
say human counterpoint, though
without string quartet

you’ll note that distressing tonalities
affect throughout this other, much
more successful however, tribute,
but the different rhythms of the
recurrent, which is to say minimalist,
rails keep you emotionally, as it were,
on track

“Different Trains“ is appropriately,
and profoundly, commemorative,
not to mention unforgettable

Richard

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April 22, 2016

Beethoven – piano sonata no.31, op.110 (3rd movement)‏

woman-reading-in-a-garden-1903.jpg!Large

“Woman Reading in a Garden“ (1902-03)

Henri Matisse

_______

perhaps my best teacher ever was
my father, others never questioned
the orthodoxy, spewing out the
curriculum like it was sacred, dead,
untouchable, depriving it of its very
worth

my father was a philosopher, God

was a question, not an answer, I,

at the time, needed an answer

we were sent to a Catholic school,

my sister and I, where God was in

everything, everywhere, omnipotent,

omniscient, and, like a father then,

autocratic, industrious, demanding,

not unopposed to punishment

sins against the Father could be

summarized, at that age, briefly,

do not kill, do not lie, do not

disobey your parents, do not

cheat on your husband, wife,

and follow all the rituals of the

Church, the Ten Christian

Commandments, brought to

you universally then by Charlton

“Moses” Heston, under the aegis

of Cecil B. DeMille

none of these graded offences

applied to me, really, then, but

lying, and disobeying one’s

parents, the others were all so

remote as to be inconsequential,

though the Church kept up on

our family’s abrogations of

religious rites – non-attendance

at Sunday mass, eating meat

on Fridays, worse – while

nevertheless tending dutifully

to our wayward souls, they told

us, holding out for a final repentant

confession

we never lied at home, I’d lied about

something once, and was so daunted

when my father probed, I sweated,

must’ve turned purple, not just red,

of embarrassment, I knew I couldn’t

use that tactic again, I’d inexorably

blush, flush

who put the Brylcreem on the dog,

he’d queried

not me, I trembled

my sister stood beside me, might

not have even known anything

about it, I can’t remember, though

I recall her dismay, I think, at having

been so blithely thrown under the

bus, or maybe that’s just me

extrapolating

my dad turned back to what he’d

been doing, having, I’d understood,

got his answer, proving himself to

be to me thereby omniscient, I’d

have no chance, I gathered, against

something like that, this turned me

into a good, an at least conscientious,

person

my teachers, paradoxically, only

ever took marks off for technical

stuff, Math, History, French, they

never taught me lessons

a teacher, once, had asked me to

stand at the head of the class and

read a passage from Shakespeare,

be Romeo, Mark Antony, Lear, I

can’t remember which

“O, pardon me, thou bleeding

piece of earth, / That I am meek

and gentle with these butchers!”,

I uttered, fraught with emotion,

“Thou art the ruins of the noblest

man / That ever lived in the tide

of times”

in my mind and in my body I was

Mark Antony there, shot through

with the weight of his friend’s

brutal death, his own irretrievable

loss

my teacher laughed

what, I asked

you’re right into it, aren’t you, he

replied, and shut me up right there

to any public display of expression

I didn’t stop reading Shakespeare

though, but by myself

later I read Homer, Ovid, Proust,

others, did the same with music

and art, made countless lifelong

friends thereby, people I’ve always

been able to turn to, even just in

ruminative thought as their stories

still pervaded me, diligently leading

still the way, like guardian angels,

maybe

here’s one

Richard

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August 11, 2015

“Death and the Maiden” – Franz Schubert‏

“Ophelia“ (1889)

John William Waterhouse

___________

though death is not an especially
appealing topic for many, it was
nevertheless of fundamental
consideration during the
Romantic Period

Goethe, the German poet, had
already created a sensation
with his “The Sorrows of Young
Werther“, a young man,
disappointed in love, takes his
own life, a potent seed for the
new era, secularism was
overtaking theocracy, the
autocracy of the Christian
Church was giving way to the
prevalence of human rights,
a private opinion, well disputed,
was holding sway against the
rigidities of religious orthodoxies,
science and reason had been
chipping away at the very idea
of God

but with human rights there was
the question of personal
responsibility, if not an imposed
authority, then each man, woman
was in charge of his, her own

the fundamental question,
therefore, was Shakespeare’s
“To be or not to be“, or, for that
matter, Burt Bacharach’s and
Hal David’s “What’s it all about“

this is not me, this is Albert Camus
talking, who formalized the situation
in the 1940s

“There is but one truly serious
philosophical problem, and that
is suicide. Judging whether life
is or is not worth living amounts
to answering the fundamental
question of philosophy. All the
rest — whether or not the world
has three dimensions, whether
the mind has nine or twelve
categories — comes afterwards.”

after Werther, Madame Bovary followed,
Anna Karenina, suicide had become an
option, the penalty was no longer
opprobrium, castigation, as it had been
under unforgiving religious constraints

death itself, fatefully rather than
personally determined, was, of course,
no less considered when the era of
heartfelt declarations dominated,
Mendelssohn had written his
“Quartet no 6 in F minor, opus 80”
for his deceased sister, Beethoven
and Chopin, each his “Funeral March“,
either, incidentally, still iconic, and
perhaps the most poignant work
of all in this manner, Schubert’s
“Death and the Maiden“, a precursor
of his own much too premature
demise

this is music as if your life depended
on it

watch, listen

Richard

psst:

the Alban Berg Quartet, a group who
set the standard for several significant
string quartets in the ’80s, do no less
with this one

you’re not likely to see a better
performance of it ever, nor, for that
matter, of anything, pace even Glenn
Gould, a statement I think nearly
against my religion

you be the judge

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June 30, 2015

at the XVth International Tchaikovsky Competition – Bach‏

““J.S. Bach, Wohltemp. Klav. Bd. I, No. IV. (Extrait) / (Duo de Tristesse)” (1957)

Robert Strûbin

________

if I’ve been getting on their backs
about their Bachs at the Tchaikovsky
Competition, it’s that they’re playing
Bach as though he were mediocre
Beethoven, it’s like asking Duke
Ellington to be Pink Floyd, it’s just
a completely different generation,
era

Bach wrote for the harpsichord, a
precursor to the piano, it could not
control the volume, nor the length
of a note, the pianoforte came
along to resolve both issues

therefore before Beethoven, who
made full use of the new invention
and worked hard the pianissimos
and the fortissimos, to degrees that
often became either inappropriate
or too authoritative, indelicate or
obnoxious if you’re not in the mood
– I remember wanting to play his so
solemn 111 at my father’s funeral,
but realized late that the first
movement was not especially in
that situation warranted, nor even
parts of the transcendental, but not
always not obstreperous, adagio –
and thumbed thus his nose at the
aristocracy, who earlier, before
the citoyens had demanded their
rights and when the world had
been considered to be of a
rational, logical order, a clock,
and as regular, would never have
tolerated such impudence

Bach and Mozart do not sway
much from strict rhythm, neither
do they alter volume much at all

so that the constant display of
heartfelt Bach and passionate
Mozart becomes cloying, and
not at all what these Classical
and Baroque masters would
have approved of

nor Beethoven, nor Chopin, for
that matter, whose strict tempo
markings didn’t include much
rubato, ritardandos, which you
could think of as milking a note,
putting velvet on your canvas,
it doesn’t work, the composition
itself unaided by bathos, pathos,
delivers, check out, of course,
Glenn Gould

Andrei Korobeinikov sat me right
down the other night with his
arresting BWV868, thrilling,
followed by more dazzling
pyrotechnics, though he fizzled,
and fractured his Beethoven, the
very 111 I care so much for, I
couldn’t even finish, you don’t
need a velvet canvas behind the
111, neither cloying ritardandos,
just skill, nor tangles of notes,
for that matter

Richard

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Richibi’s Weblog

Category: Glenn Gould

August 3, 2019

a degustation

July 6, 2018

Piano Sonata no 17, opus 31, no 2 “The Tempest” – Beethoven

July 5, 2018

Piano Concerto no. 9 – Mozart

July 3, 2018

Piano Concerto no. 5, opus 73, “Emperor” – Beethoven

May 25, 2018

32 Variations in C Minor, WoO.80 – Beethoven

March 6, 2018

String Quartet in F major, opus 77, no 2 – Joseph Haydn

August 11, 2017

threnodies: to the victims of Hiroshima, of the Holocaust, and to the Canadian North

April 22, 2016

Beethoven – piano sonata no.31, op.110 (3rd movement)‏

August 11, 2015

“Death and the Maiden” – Franz Schubert‏

June 30, 2015

at the XVth International Tchaikovsky Competition – Bach‏