Bach: Well-Tempered Clavier

[Mandryka]

The first half of the recording of WTC2 above makes me think of Elliott Carter's 4th String Quartet.

Kenneth Weiss goes further than anyone else I can recall in creating tension by making the voices independent. The result can feel like a bunch of people talking in a room without listening to each other.

But to leave it at that would be to paint half the picture, because Weiss's music making is, surprisingly, emotionally rich. This is because Weiss's articulation and his rubato are particularly eloquent. 

Fundamentally it's as if Weiss gives us a Bach who is Samuel Beckett avant l'heure. In Happy Days and Krapp's Last Tape, those isolated, lost and lonely individuals experience tenderness, love and joy and hope, despite everything. And similarly in Weiss's performances the WTC 2 voices sing a very humane song, and occasionally make fleeting and precarious contact. 

Weiss's vision makes Bach sound strange, and I think that's a good thing. This is early music after all. Weiss seems to me an uncompromising poet with a great sensitivity for the baroque - he never lets his ideas become tempered by classical or romantic perceptions of beauty, harmony and consonance.

I believe that Weiss has an holistic conception of this music. That's to say, as the music moves from one prelude and fugue to another,  the relation between the voices becomes less antagonistic, the warmth and humanity of the expression augments. Like with Winterreise we progress. Like Bunyan's pilgrim, we are redeemed. We evolve from pain to love.

It's live, I was at the concert. The experience of multiple listenings to the recording has helped me get clearer about what Weiss is up to.

[Mandryka]

What struck me today listening to Glenn Gould's Bk 2 is how cold most of the music making is, and yet suddenly and unexpectedly, now and then, he comes up with a prelude or fugue which is clearly deeply felt and eloquently expressed. It's as if he can't quite sustain his default sewing machine mode all the time. A friend of mine described it as "repressed emotion" and called it a tragedy, and maybe that's right. Like Gould was scared of what the music made him feel, wanted to hide it with virtuosity and velocity, but sometimes, as in a Freudian complex, the sentiment surfaces. I have no better way of explaining the incoherence of styles in the recording.

Another thing that struck me is that the attractive "naughty boy" image of Glenn Gould's music making has to a great extent evaporated with time because of the flowering of HIP. It's maybe paradoxical that the performers who have been informed by authentic musical practice should prove to be the most diverse and the most imaginative about how to present Bach's music, but it's true. Glenn Gould seems no more bold and imaginative than Wilson, Egarr, Asperen, Koopman or Weiss - on the contrary. It's only in the context of people who perform on modern piano that Gould seems iconoclastic or insolent, but that's just a reflection of how poor piano players have been in baroque music.

His great weaknesses remain for me the stiff pulse of nearly all his music making, and his strange detached touch. His sense of swing has always been appreciated and does to some extent mitigate the motoric rhythms. But his aversion to expressive rubato is a fault, I'm sure of it. Nothing mitigates the touch and you just have to put up with it.

In short this WTC 2 is really a train wreck. It's a credit to Gould's PR department that anyone still bothers with it.

[prémont]

Thanks for this post, Mandryka, food for afterthought. Never before have I seen Gould's style so well described.

[Wakefield]

Thanks for this post, Mandryka, food for afterthought. Never before have I seen Gould's style so well described.

Well, I totally disagree. This is not a description, but an opinion.

Its pretext is Gould's WTC, but I suspect it's really just a particularization of the reviewer's general opinion about Gould's artistry (or pseudo-artistry, if we share Madryka's opinion).

A derogatory, pretentious and condescending opinion (poor Gould's fans! deceived by his PR department, which still works more than 3 decades after his death).

[San Antone]

Well, I totally disagree. This is not a description, but an opinion.

Its pretext is Gould's WTC, but I suspect it's really just a particularization of the reviewer's general opinion about Gould's artistry (or pseudo-artistry, if we share Madryka's opinion).

A derogatory, pretentious and condescending opinion (poor Gould's fans! deceived by his RP department, which still works more than 3 decades after his death).

+1

I recently listened to Gould's WTC and enjoyed it quite a bit.  Stupid me.

[prémont]

Well, I totally disagree. This is not a description, but an opinion.

Its pretext is Gould's WTC, but I suspect it's really just a particularization of the reviewer's general opinion about Gould's artistry (or pseudo-artistry, if we share Madryka's opinion).

Gould was certainly a technically very gifted pianist, but when we talk about his Bach recordings (most of which I have listened to attentively several times), I always found his stiff, mechanical and monotonic playing misguided. The music needs a much more differntiated articulation and agogic rubato.

So please tell me what special Bach'ian features Gould's interpretations in your opinion contains.

[kishnevi]

I think of Gould's approach as a necessary corrective.  And stiff or not, monotonic or not, I find the result coherent and pleasing in my ears.

Have any of you ever heard Ashkenazy's recording of the Partitas-- which if anything errs too much in the opposite direction. I like it, but in the same way as I like Karajan's Mozart symphonies, which are so wrong they are right.

[Mookalafalas]

Gould was certainly a technically very gifted pianist, but when we talk about his Bach recordings (most of which I have listened to attentively several times), I always found his stiff, mechanical and monotonic playing misguided. The music needs a much more differntiated articulation and agogic rubato.

So please tell me what special Bach'ian features Gould's interpretations in your opinion contains.

"Needs"?  You seem to be proving Gordo's point about mistaking opinion for fact.  You think it is much better played a different way, which is valid (and I generally agree), but it's still just an opinion.   
   I could say greco-roman statuary is cold and lifeless and "needs" to be painted to give it warmth.  it's certainly true in a way, but it is beautiful in its cold austerity as well, which is equally true of Gould's playing.

[Mandryka]

Well, I totally disagree. This is not a description, but an opinion.

Its pretext is Gould's WTC, but I suspect it's really just a particularization of the reviewer's general opinion about Gould's artistry (or pseudo-artistry, if we share Madryka's opinion).

A derogatory, pretentious and condescending opinion (poor Gould's fans! deceived by his PR department, which still works more than 3 decades after his death).

You may underestimate the importance of Public Relations in the music market.

[Mandryka]

+1

I recently listened to Gould's WTC and enjoyed it quite a bit.  Stupid me.

What did you enjoy about Bk 2?

[XB-70 Valkyrie]

The first half of the recording of WTC2 above makes me think of Elliott Carter's 4th String Quartet.

Kenneth Weiss goes further than anyone else I can recall in creating tension by making the voices independent. The result can feel like a bunch of people talking in a room without listening to each other.

But to leave it at that would be to paint half the picture, because Weiss's music making is, surprisingly, emotionally rich. This is because Weiss's articulation and his rubato are particularly eloquent. 

Fundamentally it's as if Weiss gives us a Bach who is Samuel Beckett avant l'heure. In Happy Days and Krapp's Last Tape, those isolated, lost and lonely individuals experience tenderness, love and joy and hope, despite everything. And similarly in Weiss's performances the WTC 2 voices sing a very humane song, and occasionally make fleeting and precarious contact. 

Weiss's vision makes Bach sound strange, and I think that's a good thing. This is early music after all. Weiss seems to me an uncompromising poet with a great sensitivity for the baroque - he never lets his ideas become tempered by classical or romantic perceptions of beauty, harmony and consonance.

I believe that Weiss has an holistic conception of this music. That's to say, as the music moves from one prelude and fugue to another,  the relation between the voices becomes less antagonistic, the warmth and humanity of the expression augments. Like with Winterreise we progress. Like Bunyan's pilgrim, we are redeemed. We evolve from pain to love.

It's live, I was at the concert. The experience of multiple listenings to the recording has helped me get clearer about what Weiss is up to.

Very interesting review, thanks. I cannot find on Amazon--will look elsewhere later. Where can one buy it?

For the WTC on harpsichord I only have Walcha and Kirkpatrick (bk II. is on clavichord I believe) and I enjoy both a great deal. However, I am looking for more recent recordings (new to my ear at least). This may fit the bill.

Have you heard his recordings of the Goldbergs and Partitas?

[Mandryka]

Yes I've heard the Goldbergs and Partitas, I'm not quite ready to comment except to say that I think that his more recent work is particularly interesting.

[North Star]

Very interesting review, thanks. I cannot find on Amazon--will look elsewhere later. Where can one buy it?

[asin]B00J4ZQL0U[/asin]

[Wakefield]

Gould was certainly a technically very gifted pianist, but when we talk about his Bach recordings (most of which I have listened to attentively several times), I always found his stiff, mechanical and monotonic playing misguided. The music needs a much more differntiated articulation and agogic rubato.

So please tell me what special Bach'ian features Gould's interpretations in your opinion contains.

After a 60-year discussion on Gould's style, I guess everyone has his own opinion, and I'm very skeptic about any possibility of consensus, or even real dialogue about him. Gould was an eccentric in every imaginable meaning: technically, personally, professionally, as a performing artist, at the recording studio and so on.

I could say I love his total (even bodily) involvement with Bach music, his evident interpretative solipsism, his suggestion of a sort of perpetuum mobile in this music, the staccatos (in flagrant contradiction with the previous feature), but nothing will be enough to begin a real dialogue because everyone (at least here, on this board) has his own and unchangeable opinion about the guy.

BTW, I hate his Beethoven.     

[Wakefield]

"Needs"?  You seem to be proving Gordo's point about mistaking opinion for fact.  You think it is much better played a different way, which is valid (and I generally agree), but it's still just an opinion.   
   I could say greco-roman statuary is cold and lifeless and "needs" to be painted to give it warmth.  it's certainly true in a way, but it is beautiful in its cold austerity as well, which is equally true of Gould's playing.

An insightful example, sir. 

[prémont]

I think of Gould's approach as a necessary corrective.  And stiff or not, monotonic or not, I find the result coherent and pleasing in my ears.

"Needs"?  You seem to be proving Gordo's point about mistaking opinion for fact.  You think it is much better played a different way, which is valid (and I generally agree), but it's still just an opinion.   

Of course Gould's way of playing was a reaction to romanticism, but it is a very radical reaction, and to day we have got further in the shape of a more balanced and informed view. From treatises by baroque authors and from many of Bach's scores it is possible to get some idea of their performance practice, particularly the articulation. But also about thing like expressing different affects, and Gould - with his sewing machine approach - does not seem to take such things into consideration.

[James]

I could say I love his total (even bodily) involvement with Bach music <<snip>>

Total involvement & engagement with that music indeed. He revolutionized Bach playing despite what anyone here dreams up.

[prémont]

After a 60-year discussion on Gould's style, I guess everyone has his own opinion, and I'm very skeptic about any possibility of consensus, or even real dialogue about him. Gould was an eccentric in every imaginable meaning: technically, personally, professionally, as a performing artist, at the recording studio and so on.

I could say I love his total (even bodily) involvement with Bach music, his evident interpretative solipsism, his suggestion of a sort of perpetuum mobile in this music, the staccatos (in flagrant contradiction with the previous feature), but nothing will be enough to begin a real dialogue because everyone (at least here, on this board) has his own and unchangeable opinion about the guy.

BTW, I hate his Beethoven. 

For me the point of departure is an idea about how Bach's music may have sounded in his time, an idea which is based upon many years of preoccupation with his music, including reading litterature and scores. And I think that the elements in Gould's music-making you mention are rather un-Bachian (perpetuum mobile, persistent staccato). Maybe my attitude is too venerational, but I always found it difficult to subscribe to the wheeling and dealing some people think they freely can impose upon the music, probably in an attempt to make the music less museum-like - as if that was necessary. Gould may be interesting as a person, but his music making (Bach and yes, much of his Beethoven) is less involving.

[San Antone]

I remember noticing how he brought out the contrapuntal lines in a manner which enlightened my enjoyment of the music.  The description that has been used of "sewing machine" style is not one I would use, nor recognize in Gould's playing.

[aukhawk]

Nor I