Glenn Gould On Television The Complete CBC Broadcasts 1954 To 1977 DVD 1 10
Malena Bower
Sony has gathered together almost 20 hours of documentary, performance, interview, spoken word, short illustrated lectures, and music-making featuring the Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould (1932-1982), as he appeared on CBC television (the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) between 1954 and 1977. The ten DVDs are priced so reasonably (at not much over $10 each) that the collection represents a real bargain. It's something that listeners familiar with those broadcasts, those curious about Gould, and those willing to suspend, perhaps, awareness of the exaggerations and cult of the pianist in order to experience highly significant and compelling music-making will want to get.
1995-2022 Classical Net
Use of text, images, or any other copyrightable material contained in these pages, without the written permission of the copyright holder,
except as specified in the Copyright Notice, is strictly prohibited. All Rights Reserved.
Glenn Gould on Television The Complete CBC Broadcasts 1954 to 1977 DVD 1 10
DOWNLOAD https://xiuty.com/2yVsD8
Gould exhibited tremendous talent and proficiency as a pianist, but his life was not that of a child prodigy. His public appearances with the TCM and the Kiwanis festivals earned him his first serious attention as a pianist. He participated in his first radio broadcast (for CFRB, on 10 March 1945) with other Kiwanis Festival winners, and gave his first full solo piano recital at the TCM on 10 April 1945.
He also composed music avidly from early childhood. He wrote both tonal pieces (based on a major or minor musical key), and atonal pieces (music not based on a particular key), as well as 12-tone idioms (music based on the 12 chromatic tones within an octave; see serialism). He showed a preference for highly organized, contrapuntal forms (music with more than one simultaneous melodic line). From age five through his late teens, he occasionally performed his compositions in public. He also gave some public performances on the organ until 1948; in fact, his professional debut was as an organist at a 1945 Christmas concert at the Eaton Auditorium.
As a pianist, he first appeared with an orchestra on 8 May 1946 at Massey Hall, playing the first movement of Beethoven's Concerto No. 4 with the TCM orchestra, conducted by Ettore Mazzoleni. On 14 and 15 January 1947, he performed the entire concerto with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bernard Heinze, in a concert for secondary school pupils. He gave his first professional recital shortly after his 15th birthday, on 20 October 1947, at the Eaton Auditorium. This performance marked the beginning of his long association with concert manager Walter Homburger, which lasted until 1968.
Gould made his CBC Radio debut on 24 December 1950, playing Mozart's Sonata K. 281 and Paul Hindemith's Sonata No. 3 on a piano with a heavy, dark bass. While preparing the recording of the performance for broadcast, he experienced something of an epiphany. He found that by suppressing the bass and boosting the treble, he could make the piano sound the way he had failed to do during his performance. His realization that, through technology, he could overcome the piano's limitations and improve upon his original result would fundamentally influence his attitudes and approach to performance and recording.
In January 1951, he organized an ambitious "Recital of Contemporary Music" at the Royal Conservatory of Music and, with schoolmate Robert Fulford, formed the company New Music Associates, which held three concerts in Toronto in 1952 and 1954. He undertook his first Western Canadian tour (of Vancouver and Calgary) in 1951, and later made debuts in Montral (1952), Ottawa (1953), the Maritimes (Saint John, 1953) and Winnipeg (1954). He appeared at the inaugural Stratford Festival in 1953 as part of the Festival Trio, a chamber group with violinist Albert Pratz and cellist Isaac Mamott, and returned to the Festival often in the following years.
By the time Gould was 20, the unconventional repertoire characteristic of his adult concerts was established: a little 16th- and 17th-century music, a great deal of Bach, a very select group of Classical and Romantic works, and a generous selection of mostly Austro-German 20th-century music, including the complete piano works of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. He performed few of the early-Romantic and Impressionistic works at the core of the piano repertoire at the time.
Through the early 1950s, Gould appeared often in solo recitals, chamber music and concertos on CBC Radio (a program on 21 December 1953 included the Canadian premiere of Schoenberg's concerto). He was also a featured performer in the first television program ever broadcast in English Canada on 8 September 1952.
On 2 January 1955, Gould made his American debut at the Phillips Gallery in Washington, DC, and on 11 January played in Town Hall, NY, both times in a program of music by Orlando Gibbons, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, Bach, Webern, late Beethoven and Berg. The morning after the New York recital, he was offered a contract by Columbia Masterworks (later CBS Masterworks and Sony Classical, now Sony Masterworks), for which he recorded for the rest of his life. His first Columbia recording, a brilliantly virtuosic and highly original reading of Bach's Goldberg Variations, recorded in June 1955 and released in January 1956, was enthusiastically received, and immediately brought him international attention.
Gould had wide-ranging musical and intellectual interests, and never wanted to be limited to the life of a concert pianist. He had ambitions to conduct and compose, and from his late teens demonstrated gifts as a writer on musical subjects. The range of his talents and interests was widely admired. During his concert years, he continued to record prolifically for Columbia, to write and lecture, and to perform on CBC Radio and TV. He made his first radio documentary, on Schoenberg, in 1962, and delivered a dozen lectures from 1963 to 1964, most of which have been published.
Increasingly attracted to his work in the electronic and print media, Gould decided to give up the life of a concert pianist to devote himself to recording, broadcasting, composing and writing. At the height of his fame and creative powers, he gave his last live concert performance on 10 April 1964 at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles.
While Gould's live concert career wound down, his radio and TV recitals and documentaries were becoming more innovative and sophisticated as he explored beyond the limits of the conventional broadcast recital. In the early 1960s, he began giving radio and TV recitals that were unified thematically or tied together with his own spoken commentary. He also became prolific as a writer, exploring many musical and non-musical topics in liner notes, periodical articles, reviews, scripts and interviews.
However, he never realized his plan to devote himself largely to composition after his retirement from concert life; despite ambitious plans and sketches for chamber and orchestral music, songs, and opera, his serious composing effectively ceased after 1964. He did notate or record some of his transcriptions (versions re-written for piano), including three of orchestral music by Wagner, and one of Ravel's own transcription of La Valse.
Increasingly, Gould sought other ways to express himself away from the piano. He created many programs in which he did not perform but instead explored musical topics that interested him, such as recording and broadcasting, the "psychology of improvisation," aleatoric music (music composed randomly, e.g., by rolling dice), and the Moog synthesizer. His innovations were rewarded with the Canadian Confederation Medal in 1967 and the Canada Council for the Arts' Molson Prize in 1968.
In 1970, he declined a nomination to the Order of Canada and moved his recording operations to Toronto from New York. He composed the music for the feature film Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) and won the only Grammy award in his lifetime for Best Classical Album Notes for his 1973 album Hindemith: Sonatas for Piano.
As he approached age 50, Gould was planning to phase out his career as a recording pianist while fulfilling ambitious plans to make recordings as a conductor. He made his first and only official recording as a conductor (Wagner's Siegfried-Idyll) in the summer of 1982. He also arranged music for the feature film The Wars (1983).
Gould planned to stop recording altogether around 1985, and devote himself to writing and composing. However, on 27 September 1982, a few days after his 50th birthday, and approximately a week after the release of a best-selling second recording of the Goldberg Variations, he suffered a massive stroke and died on 4 October 1982.
Outside popular music, possibly no artist to date has expanded the technological possibilities of recorded music, or explored its aesthetic and even ethical implications, more than Gould. He believed that his performances were not just readings of pieces of music, but documents that reflected his entire world view. He thought (as had creators in the Romantic era) that artists had a "moral mission," and that art had enormous potential for the betterment of human life.
Gould became a leading exponent among classical performers of a true philosophy of recording, which he passionately defended in articles and broadcasts, and practiced in dozens of albums for Columbia/CBS, developing a hands-on expertise in recording techniques.
For Gould, recording had fundamentally altered the traditional relationship of composer, performer and listener. He justified his interpretive experiments in part by arguing that there was no point in making yet another recording of, for example, the Emperor Concerto, without offering significant departures from conventional readings already available.
Gould produced original, deeply personal, sometimes shocking musical interpretations, often employing extreme tempos, odd dynamics and even odder phrasing. He had a lifelong, controversial penchant for flouting conventional ideas about the piano and musical interpretation, perhaps exemplified by his fondness for detached articulation (playing without connecting the melody notes).
b37509886e