Glenn Gould plays Bach (1952-1955) (Johann Sebastian Bach)

Album review

This album is a mysterious little historical item that merely identifies the contents as radio recordings from Toronto, with no indication of the original owners or personnel and no suggestion of how they came into the hands of the Istituto Discografico Italiano. Nevertheless, as examples of the development of the Canadian pianist's unique style, they'll be of considerable interest to Glenn Gould lovers, even if they're decidedly not a good choice for the listener looking for the introduction the album title implies. (For that, try the identically titled release from Sony.) The recordings date from between October 1952, when Gould had just turned 20, to 1955, when, in the last selection on the program, he approached the general style of his early Columbia-label recordings in a performance with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. In between are recordings that show meteoric growth. In the earliest recording, the 1952 Italian Concerto, BWV 971, Gould is a preternatural technician with flashes of brilliant originality. By the recording of the Partita No. 5 in G major, BWV 829, in 1954, he is using articulation in completely unexpected ways but is not tying his interpretations together on a larger scale. The various prelude-and-fugue sets date from between 1952 and 1954 and show the pianist mastering a variety of relationships between conventional Baroque forms and deploying them to reveal polyphonic detail in startling ways. And beyond all this, perhaps the most interesting aspect of these early performances is that Gould's notorious humming at the keyboard is not in evidence, throwing into question his longtime contention that it was unconscious. Perhaps he felt he couldn't get away with it at this early stage, or perhaps the engineers involved were simply unusually successful at eliminating it from the mix. It's not a question of background noise obscuring the humming; except for the Italian Concerto, which is pretty rough in the middle movement and finale, the sound is reasonably clear for the early 1950s. The mystery that was Glenn Gould is only deepened by this release, which is all to the good for his fans.
© TiVo