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1982 Glenn Gould Bach Goldberg Variations Piano Vinyl LP Record CBS IM37779 VG+
Record Grade per Goldmine Standard: VG+ to NM
Side/Seite/Face 1 Aria & Variations 1-15 Side/Seite/Face 2 Variations 16-30 & Aria In 1955, a young Canadian pianist made his first recording for what was then Columbia Masterworks. At that time he was not well-known to concert audiences and was completely unknown to the record market. But after the recording sessions of June of that year, in Columbia's famous 30th Street Studios in New York City, and after the release of his first album, Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Glenn Gould became world-famous. His perfor- mance of Bach's 1742 collection of “key- board exercises” created an international recording sensation and achieved the unique distinction of becoming an album that, from its original release date to the present, was never absent from the active catalog of Masterworks recordings. In 1970, Glenn Gould completed a recording session at the 30th Street Studios and decided that in future he would record exclusively in Toronto, where his television and film activities were centered. He did not again return to this musically historical building until 1980, when he began making his first digital recordings for CBS Master- works—the Six Last Sonatas of Haydn and the Goldberg Variations. Why did Glenn Gould, who seldom records a piece twice, choose to re-record a work that had received a definitive perfor- mance at his hands 27 years ago? Gould has offered only the explanation that new technology plus his own desire to re- examine the work in terms of its “arithme- tical correspondence between theme and variation” led him back into the studio for this recording. Any more complete expla- nation of this new approach would, according to Gould, entail a complete written analysis, in an almost book-length essay, of the “thirty very interesting but independent-minded pieces” that make up the Variations—a fascinating prospect, to be sure. Samuel H. Carter, who co-produced the Last Six Sonatas of Haydn, also worked on the new Goldberg Variations. Following are some of his observations of the last recording sessions: Sometime past midnight on Sat- urday, May 27. 1981. the doors of CBS's famous 30th Street Recording Studios in New York closed on the last official rec- ording session to be held there by CBS Masterworks. Out of those doors walked a man—assuredly only after a “cool down” period and change of shirt-a man whose illustrious recording career began there a little over a quarter century before. With an appropriateness that is usually found only in fiction, the last notes played by Glenn Gould that night were from the same work of Bach—the Goldberg Varia- tions—with which he had first transfixed the music world in the summer of 1955. Now the Studio, once a kind of mecca for some of the world's greatest musicians, was to be sold, victim of the changed for- tunes of an industry that has become as multi-national as any other and as com- petitive. For Glenn Gould and for those of us whose association with “Columbia" covers a long span of years, the old church is a place where many ghosts walk in an atmosphere so laden as to be almost claustrophobic, in spile of the soaring reaches of the ceilings. Glenn Gould may have quietly come out by the same door wherein he entered but while he had been inside he stirred things up more than a little. Pablo Casals once said that Bach is “a volcano," speaking of course of the emotional con- tent of the music that traditionalists tried so hard for so long to deny. Gould, too, is something of a volcanic force. He is the embodiment of musical sophistication in that he seems always to know what he intends the music to do. He almost never lets the music happen to him—he happens to it. That is what made many musicians who nominally “knew” the Goldberg Vari- ations feel that they had just discovered them when the 1955 album appeared. May I suggest that, with this new recording, many additional “discoveries” will be made. The nature of these will doubtless be as many and various as the number of listeners. 1 think of Glenn Gould as an artist of strong intentionality. He shapes and molds a musical line in its breadth and in its detail with breathtaking awareness. As he has often told interviewers, he will try to make each performance different, yet this firm intention is always present so that however different the “take” there is never any ten- tativeness or absence of character. This new digital recording of the Gold- berg Variations was made, in the main, simultaneously with a video-taping. Make- up sessions were held on April 25 and May 29 for (he purposes of the recording. Having worked extensively in both mediums as performer and producer, Glenn was almost instantly aware, in seeing and hearing a playback, of what takes or portions of lakes were suitable for the film and recording and which for the film only. I often fell that he was being excessively nit-picking, only to discover in the intensive listening and editing sessions that followed that he had known precisely the difference he wanted in every case. He is a man who is very reluctant to accept anything short of the absolute attainment of his artistic goal. Engineers: Stan Tonkel, John Johnson, Ray Moore. Marlin Greenblatl. Digitally recorded using the Sony System. Mastered from the original digital recording in the CBS Recording Studios, New York on the CBS DisCompmer™ system.






LP580