If you love Glen Gould playing Bach - I’d recommend checking out Vikingur Olafsson. https://vikingurolafsson.com/media/
In awe of seeing Vikingur recommended here :) he also has a great recording of Philip Glass if that's your thing.
How to play the piano: On Glenn Gould
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Re: How to play the piano: On Glenn Gould
#12Funny, I've been a bit obsessed with Alfred Brendel's recordings of the Schubert impromptus recently (especially No. 2). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yaUxihBZXs He's an exceptional world class pianist and I have to imagine that the ideas in his book come from a place of deep experience. I only mention this because the LRB critic is pretty savage toward Brendel in the review and one might walk away from the review…
I grew up on Brendel's recordings of Beethoven's piano sonatas. I still love his sincere way of playing them, that doesn't try to turn them into show-off pieces. I prefer Brendel's Beethoven to Gould's most of the time. But the limitations of Brendel's techinque are sometimes detectable in his playing. From a technical standpoint Gould is on another planet from Brendel, and I don't think Brendel himself would disagre…
I agree wholeheartedly about Gould's technique (at least in his early years) but whether one appreciates the music he makes will always involve other non-purely-technical criteria. For example, I'd almost always rather listen to Murray Perahia's Goldberg Variations than Gould's. I just love Perahia's sense of musicality and the warmth of it all. Gould's younger Goldbergs are insanely virtuosic/quicksilver but I find myself almost getting beat over the head by it all.
In either event, my point about Brendel was more just that he's worth checking out in his own right and not just some dude who wrote a possibly crappy book. And I still love his Schubert Impromptus even if his technique looks lame to more discerning eyes!
Re: How to play the piano: On Glenn Gould
#13I play piano and watching videos of Gould playing is fascinating. He violates every rule your piano teacher tells you about performance, from his unusually low chair made to accommodate a back injury to his habit of singing along to tunes that was often picked up in his album recordings. I especially like this performance of Beethoven's 32 variations in C minor by him [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoWXRlw9…
this one is my favourite - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rywN8MoiEk ;)
Re: How to play the piano: On Glenn Gould
#14I play piano and watching videos of Gould playing is fascinating. He violates every rule your piano teacher tells you about performance, from his unusually low chair made to accommodate a back injury to his habit of singing along to tunes that was often picked up in his album recordings. I especially like this performance of Beethoven's 32 variations in C minor by him [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoWXRlw9…
this one is my favourite - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rywN8MoiEk ;)
Strangely enough:
Re: How to play the piano: On Glenn Gould
#15I play piano and watching videos of Gould playing is fascinating. He violates every rule your piano teacher tells you about performance, from his unusually low chair made to accommodate a back injury to his habit of singing along to tunes that was often picked up in his album recordings. I especially like this performance of Beethoven's 32 variations in C minor by him [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoWXRlw9…
this one is my favourite - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rywN8MoiEk ;)
So odd! I saw the URL gray and thought it was a Rickroll, but didn't see the familiar dQw. Apparently that's from when I was looking for DX7 videos.
Re: How to play the piano: On Glenn Gould
#16> After a bizarre incident at Steinway’s in New York in 1959, when one of the senior technicians (whom Gould disliked because of disagreements over piano regulation) greeted him with a rather too hard clap on the shoulder, Gould claimed major physical injury, cancelled all his engagements for six months and (unsuccessfully) sued Steinway’s for $300,000.
Hm... Horowitz's tuner Franz Mohr wrote a book where IIRC he claimed that Gould reacted negatively to his retouching of the action on Gould's piano, complained that he could have been injured by it, and threatened to sue him. I wonder if this is a different version of that same story (Mohr would have been a senior tech at Steinway at that time) or yet another tuner who Gould harassed.
Re: How to play the piano: On Glenn Gould
#17If in Toronto, you can 'sit' with Glenn outside the CBC building. It always seemed like the ideal spot to place a public piano...
http://www.torontoplaques.com/Pages/Glenn_Gould4.html
43.644327 -79.387790
Re: How to play the piano: On Glenn Gould
#18I've only recently started to come around to liking the piano as an instrument and learning my around it a bit. This article touches on some the things that kept me away from it for so long - the mechanical nature of what is regarded as "good" playing, the focus on training up finger strength. But if I'm being honest, the number one thing that kept me away was that piano just seemed so... uncool.
Watching youtube vids with killer piano covers of songs I actually love (ex, this cover of Toxcity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1g2c2760oM ) has been helpful in disabusing me of that bias though. I watched a few of Glenn Gould's videos and they were pretty great as well, but for whatever reason classical music never seems to do as much for me.
Re: How to play the piano: On Glenn Gould
#19Digression-- I love this experiment by Gould:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JllD47HIees
To my ear it is a practical failure-- when he cross-fades to the rear of the hall it simply sounds like the mic is further away. :)
Regardless of my hearing, the conception is fascinating.
Re: How to play the piano: On Glenn Gould
#20BWV 847 from the WTC is almost like a practice piece but Gould makes it sound interesting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7AQtLnNZOY
Here is a comparison on BWV 974 (Adagio)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2gVYB5oZ7o (Víkingur Ólafsson)