CD Reviews (The Straits Times, July 2013)

GULDA / GOULD Piano Works

SASHA GRYNYUK, Piano

Piano Classics 0043 / ****1/2

Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000) and Glenn Gould (1932-1982) were two of the last century’s most distinctive, unique and eccentric pianists. They were, simply put, one of a kind. The Viennese Gulda was a classicist with a penchant for jazz and improvisation. The Canadian Gould abhorred jazz but openly embraced the Second Viennese School atonalists. Both however shared a common passion for the music of J.S.Bach. This most inventive recital by young Ukrainian pianist Sasha Grynyuk unites these two greats as rather unlikely pianist-composers.

The 10 pieces of Gulda’s Play Piano Play are a distillation of jazz and Bachian counterpoint, entertaining in the same way that the more frequently performed Nikolai Kapustin. The opening number Moderato is itself a slinky fugue. Another popular piece is No.6 is a breathless toccata with the Schumannesque title Presto Possibile. Gould’s Piano Sonata and seven Short Pieces, early works dating from 1948 to 1952, bear the astringent influences of Hindemith and Schoenberg. Ironically, some of his dissonances are regularly experimented by jazz pianists today.

The disc closes with Grynyuk’s transcription of Gould’s So You Want To Write A Fugue?, originally for voices and string quartet, a hilarious take on complex fugal composition. It somehow loses its original zest without the quirky words, but this should not deter anyone from exploring these curious and amusing byways of 20^th century pianism. 

WALTZ 101

Decca 4785067 (6 CDs) / ****1/2

Compilations are only worthwhile when the musical contents are logically programmed rather than left to random and haphazard chance. In this respect Waltz 101 succeeds because the dances in three-quarter time (there are more than just 101 of them) are thematically arranged such that one begins to listen intelligently. The first two discs are devoted to the music of Johann Strauss Junior and his younger brother Josef. 

All the usual suspects – Blue Danube, Emperor, Tales from the Vienna Woods, Wine, Woman & Song – performed with the stylish flair expected from the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Willi Boskovsky. Disc 3 provides many “So that’s what it’s called” moments with popular melodies by Lehar, Waldteufel and one-hit wonders Juventino Rosas (Over The Waves) and Ivan Ivanovici (Danube Waves). One also learns that the sickly sweet waltz from the movie Eyes Wide Shut comes from Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite No.2. 

Waltzes from the great Tchaikovsky, Delibes and Adam ballets occupy disc 4. Special pleasure may be afforded from the piano in the last two discs. Every waltz of Chopin and Brahms has been included, performed by Nikita Magaloff and Julius Katchen. The rarities are the Godowsky harmonised versions of six Chopin waltzes played with incomparable insouciance by Jorge Bolet. Even Schubert’s humble set of 12 Waltzes, derived from the rustic Ländler country dances, get special attention from no less than Vladimir Ashkenazy. This lovely anthology concludes with French fare, Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, Fauré, Satie and Poulenc from the excellent Pascal Rogé. Need one receive an Invitation To The Dance to enjoy this? 

CD Reviews (The Straits Times, November 2012)

BEETHOVEN Piano Sonatas Nos.30-32

GLENN GOULD, Piano

Naxos Historical 8.111299 / ***1/2

It was well-known that the great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982) had a “blind spot that spanned from Bach to Schoenberg”. He was out of sympathy with much of classical and Romantic repertoire, and it was said that he recorded pieces he disliked in order to show how bad they were. Gould recorded Beethoven’s final Sonata trilogy in 1956, as his second commercial release for Columbia Masterworks, following the resounding critical and commercial success of his Bach Goldberg Variations. This was unequivocally panned by critics as a dud.

He took an unorthodox view of Beethoven, a composer less amenable to variation than Bach. His tempos tended to extremes, mainly ridiculously fast. The final Theme and Variations of Sonata Op.109 runs under 8 minutes (compared with Schnabel’s 14 or Arrau’s 16 minutes), and the whole work is over in 13 minutes. Repeats were shunned, and the inherent beauty and nobility stripped and spat out wholesale. Sonata Op.110 comes off unscathed but the final Sonata Op.111 suffers greater indignities. The first movement introduction is taken too leisurely and the ensuing Allegro Con Brio is a muddled blur in neck-breaking velocity. Why should we listen to these wrong-headed and misguided interpretations? Because Gould was a genius, and savants often have something valid to offer, no matter how wayward. In Gould’s own words, this was not his “most convincing recording”, but “is the most convinced”. Go figure.

BE MY LOVE

A TRIBUTE TO MARIO LANZA

JOSEPH CALLEJA, Tenor

BBC Concert Orchestra / Steven Mercurio

Decca 478 3531 / ****1/2

Almost every great tenor will cite the legacy of Mario Lanza (1921-1959) as a major influence on their singing careers. He was the most popular operatic voice of the late 1940s and 1950s, his fame coming primarily from best-selling movies with MGM rather than the opera stage. His only the major role onstage was Pinkerton from Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, which he sung just twice in 1948. He mostly specialised in short scenes and arias, as seen in the 1951 movie The Great Caruso, where he portrays the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. This hour-long anthology sees the Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja sing both operatic arias and popular songs that Lanza made his own.

Among the former include Nessun dorma (Puccini’s Turandot), Cielo e mar! (Ponchielli’s La Gioconda), Amor ti vieta (Giordano’s Fedora) and Vesti la giubba (Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci). The last impressively showcases his clear, ringing tone and dramatic intensity that matches the best from The Three Tenors. The popular songs are in Italian (Arrivederci, Roma and La Danza), Spanish (Granada) and mostly English, such as Brodszky’s Be My Love and Because You’re Mine, Rosas’s The Loveliest Night of the Year, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s You’ll Never Walk Alone (Carousel) and D’Hardelot’s Because. These standards are coloured by Calleja’s accented English, while Lanza’s vernacular was Americanised (he was, after all, born in Philadelphia). Fear not, for there is much to enjoy in Calleja’s sincerity, warmth and effortless ease of delivery.

GLENN GOULD plays BACH'S GOLDBERG VARIATIONS / A Zenph Re-Performance in Hong Kong

GLENN GOULD plays

BACH’S GOLDBERG VARIATIONS

A Zenph Re-Performance

Lecture-Recital by 

JOHN Q. WALKER, Zenph Productions

Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall

Saturday morning (13 October 2012)

This one needs a little bit of explaining before hand. The great Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982) has been deceased for thirty years, so how could he have come back from the dead to perform Bach’s Goldberg Variations for a 21^st century audience in Hong Kong? Thanks to the space age technology of Zenph Productions and its founder John Q.Walker and his team, this dream has become a reality.

It was emphasised that what we were about to witness was not a recording, nor a piano roll, but a re-performance on a modern Yamaha grand piano. Gould’s legendary 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations on Columbia Masterworks, all 17280 notes played over 38 minutes, was analysed and dissected down to the microsecond and digitised. The information – how long he played or held on to a note, the split seconds between each note, how hard he pressed the keys, and how he pedalled – was studied and fed back to the modern piano, a Yamaha Disklavier Pro specially flown in from Japan, with its action pre-determined by the use of rare earth magnets or solenoids. 

So when a piece of music is being heard, the actual keys are being depressed with the actual sounds coming out of the piano. All that is missing is the performer. What is present however is the spirit of the performer (and performance), in more ways than one.

In effect, this is a 21^st century updating of what a piano roll and player piano used to do in the 1920s and 30s. However the reproduction of sound in terms of dynamics, colour and range comes far closer to the original conception, with little or none of that mechanical note-grinding that is associated with older technology. 

Walker’s elucidation of his work is far more eloquent than what I have tried to described above, and so was his analysis of the work as a whole. The 30 variations were based on the left hand sequence of notes rather than the melody of the Aria. Every third variation was a canon, and the others were either dances or showpieces. Bach’s mathematics and counterpoint was also laid bare for his listener’s benefit.

Then the re-performance began, but not without two false starts when the keys moved but not accompanied by sound. This was soon rectified, and the famous Aria was heard, played in the rather brisk pace of the 1955 recording. Whether one preferred this or the later and much slower 1981 version was immaterial; the crisp and detached phrasing and way he dealt with grace notes and trills was unmistakeably Gould. He did use pedalling in this recording, and so the right pedal moved in accordance to the notes. Witnessing this spectacle, it was unnerving to say the least; it was Gould playing the music but he wasn’t there at the piano.

As he had played repeats for certain variations and only in the first half of each, the re-performance went by very swiftly. One marvelled at the clarity of playing, as well as how certain voices came out from seemingly nowhere. That seemed to be a Gould speciality of finding new and unexpected voices. Every listening of the work reveals new vistas, and these were rendered faithfully in this re-performance.

Then disaster struck in Variation No.27, when for a few seconds, action and sound came apart. It was as if the spirit of Glenn Gould had wilfully decided to throw a spanner in the works in a pique of… well, being Glenn Gould. Nonetheless the performance continued to the final Variation No.30, the Quodlibet, and a final statement of the Aria. There was a stunned silence that lasted half a minute, and then applause. For forty minutes or so, we sat transfixed by this miraculous marriage of technology and art, summoned for the greater good of musical understanding.

Was this simply a gimmick? No, because any listening to a performance by Glenn Gould, whether in a recording, or broadcast or a re-performance, is worth its weight in gould …, I’m sorry, gold. I just hope that this new technology – with disklaviers being more easily available these days - does not eventually become musical accompaniment to high tea at The Peninsula.

Postlude:

The following day, John Q.Walker being the perfectionist that he is, had the entire Variation No.27 re-performed, now without any glitch. Except that it now exposes Glenn Gould’s only split note in the entire performance, when he accidentally hits two notes instead of one with his left hand. The older Gould would have edited that out of the final recording, but being a 23-year-old in his début recording, Columbia let that go. The re-performance however left that in, which goes to prove that the great Glenn Gould was human after all.     

 

A ROMANCE ON THREE LEGS by KATIE HAFNER / Book Review

A ROMANCE ON THREE LEGS
By Katie Hafner
Published by Bloomsbury
Hardcover / 261 Pages
$41.56 at Books Kinokuniya
Rating ****

An edited version of this review was published in The Sunday Times on 1 March 2009.

Much has been written about the eccentric genius of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982), his premature retirement from public performance, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, chronic fear of infection and flying, programming quirks and visionary ideals. New York Times journalist Katie Hafner’s delightful little account is essentially a love story about Gould and the only Steinway Grand (designated CD 318 by Steinway’s Concert Division) on the North American continent that could satisfy his extremely finicky demands.

There are three legs to this tale; the pianist’s own prodigious childhood, the piano’s painstakingly hand-crafted beginnings, and the little-known story of visually-impaired piano technician Verne Edquist who helped cement this uneasy but miraculous relationship. The respective chapters are titled Toronto, Astoria (the site of Steinway’s sweatshop in Queens) and Saskatchewan, the unlikely locations where each party developed and blossomed.



Gould’s often prickly relations with pianos, piano technicians (including one - the unfortunate Bill Hupfer - who “maimed” him) and the Steinway company itself are shelled out in sufficient but not exhaustive detail. A lot may be learnt from Gould’s own complex and contradictory personal issues, many of his own creation. The myth that he was homosexual or asexual is quashed, and for the first time in print, the name of his paramour – a wife of a famous composer and pianist-conductor – is named. Fidelity was not one of his strong suits, when it came to women, pianos, piano technicians and piano companies.

Unlike established Gould biographies by Otto Friedrich, Kevin Bazzana and Peter Ostwald, Hafner’s take has no appendices, tables or discographies, but makes for much breezy reading even for the non-musician. There are no happy endings for both piano and pianist here.

CD 318's accidental destruction during transport was a genuine body blow to Gould, and his own investigations into the issue read - for a short while - like a mystery novel, but the outcome was ultimately anti-climactic. Gould's own demise from a cerebral haemorrhage was equally banal, but is certainly convinced that the depression left by his untimely death was an enormous one.

Katie Hafner and Verne Edquist
in Hong Kong City Hall
in October 2012, book reading at
The Joy of Music Festival.