Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491 / Schoenberg: Piano Concerto, Op. 42 (Remastered) Glenn Gould

• Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791): Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 24 in C Minor, K.491
• 1 I. Allegro 14:30
• 2 II. Larghetto 08:18
• 3 III. Allegretto 09:05
• 4 I. Andante 04:50
• 5 II. Molto allegro 02:28
• 6 III. Adagio 06:47
• 7 IV. Giocoso (moderato) 05:30
• Total Runtime 51:28

Info for Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491 / Schoenberg: Piano Concerto, Op. 42 (Remastered)

This 1962 reading of Mozart's twenty-fourth Piano Concerto (K. 491, c-minor) is the only Mozart piano concerto GG ever performed and recorded in the studio. Gould's biographer Kevin Bazzana calls it 'surprisingly powerful.' Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould

In keeping with Classical performance practices, Glenn Gould extemporizes the cadenza in Movement I--virtually writing his own as he had done with Beethoven's First Concerto.

The orchestral soloists are very good here, and miked well for clear enunciation.

Gould writes, 'It is the last movement which holds the Mozart of our dreams. Here, in a supremely beautiful set of variations, is a structure in which as variation upon variation passes by, the chromatic fugal manner which Mozart in his philosophic moods longed to espouse is applied with brilliant success.'

The very combination of these two concertos was willful, still more Gould’s playing of Mozart, with its extra embellishments and even new counter-melodies in the piano part. What seemed revolutionary at the time has become a matter of course in today’s age of “historical performance practice.” In contrast, the Schoenberg Concerto sounded, in Gould’s hands, almost as familiar as Mozart …

Glenn Gould had championed Schoenberg's Piano Concerto (Op. 42, without key signature) as early as 1953 when he first performed it in public. Here realized under the baton of the always-fine Robert Craft, Gould provides an 'unabashedly Romantic' revelation. The recording itself is miked very closely and as a result is quite 'dry.'

Glenn Gould, piano
The CBC Symphony Orchestra
Robert Craft, conductor

Digitally remastered

Glenn Gould
was born in Toronto in 1932, and enjoyed a privileged, sheltered upbringing in the quiet Beach neighborhood. His musical gifts became apparent in infancy, and though his parents never pushed him to become a star prodigy, he became a professional concert pianist at age fifteen, and soon gained a national reputation. By his early twenties, he was also earning recognition through radio and television broadcasts, recordings, writings, lectures and compositions.

Early on, Gould’s musical proclivities, piano style and independence of mind marked him as a maverick. Favoring structurally intricate music, he disdained the early-Romantic and impressionistic works at the core of the standard piano repertoire, preferring Elizabethan, Baroque, Classical, late-Romantic and early-twentieth-century music; Bach and Schoenberg were central to his aesthetic and repertoire. He was an intellectual performer, with a special gift for clarifying counterpoint and structure, but his playing was also deeply expressive and rhythmically dynamic. He had the technique and tonal palette of a virtuoso, though he upset many pianistic conventions – avoiding the sustaining pedal, using détaché articulation, for example. Believing that the performer’s role was properly creative, he offered original, deeply personal, sometimes shocking interpretations (extreme tempos, odd dynamics, finicky phrasing), particularly in canonical works by Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms.

Gould’s American début, in 1955, and the release, a year later, of his first Columbia recording, of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, launched his international concert career. He earned widespread acclaim despite his musical idiosyncrasies, while his flamboyant stage mannerisms, as well as his hypochondria and other personal eccentricities, fuelled colorful publicity that heightened his celebrity. But he hated performing – ”At concerts I feel demeaned, like a vaudevillian” – and though in great demand, he rationed his appearances stingily (he gave fewer than forty concerts overseas). Finally, in 1964, he permanently retired from concert life.

Gould harbored musical, temperamental and moral objections to concerts, and aired them publicly: “The purpose of art,” he wrote, “is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” Even before he retired, he was not satisfied with being a concert pianist; he made radio and television programs, published writings on many musical and non-musical topics, continued to compose. After 1964, this work away from the piano only intensified. He liked to call himself “a Canadian writer, composer, and broadcaster who happens to play the piano in his spare time.”

His retirement was also fuelled by his devotion to the electronic media. Gould was one of the first truly modern classical performers, for whom recording and broadcasting were not adjuncts to the concert hall but separate art forms that represented the future of music. He made scores of albums, steadily expanding his repertoire and developing a professional engineer’s command of recording techniques. He also wrote prolifically about recording and the mass media, his ideas often harmonizing with those of his friend Marshall McLuhan.

Though he never became the significant composer that he longed to be, Gould channeled his creativity into other media. In 1967, he created his first “contrapuntal radio documentary,” The Idea of North, an innovative tapestry of speaking voices, music and sound effects that drew on principles from documentary, drama, music and film. Over the next decade, he made six more such specimens of radio art, in addition to many other, more conventional, recitals and talk-and-play shows for radio and television. He also arranged music for two feature films.

Gould lived a quiet, solitary, spartan life, and guarded his privacy; his romantic relationships with women, for instance, were never made public. (“Isolation is the one sure way to human happiness.”) He maintained a modest apartment and a small studio, and left Toronto only when work demanded it, or for an occasional rural holiday. He recorded in New York until 1970, when he began to record primarily at Eaton Auditorium in Toronto.

In the summer of 1982, having largely exhausted the piano literature that interested him, he made his first recording as a conductor, and he had ambitious plans for several years’ worth of conducting projects; he planned then to give up performing, retire to the countryside, and devote himself to writing and composing. But shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Gould died suddenly of a stroke.

Since then, he has enjoyed a remarkable posthumous “life.” His multifarious work has been widely disseminated. He has been the subject of an enormous and diverse literature in many languages. And he has inspired conferences, exhibitions, festivals, societies, radio and television programs, novels, plays, musical compositions, poems, visual art and a feature film (Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould).

Moreover, his ideas – like McLuhan’s – still resonate strongly today in the world of digital technology, which was in its infancy when he died. His postmodernist advocacy of open borders between the roles of composer, performer and listener, for instance, anticipated digital technologies (like the Internet) that democratize and decentralize the institutions of culture. There is no question that Gould, more than any other classical musician, would have understood and admired digital technology – and would have had fun playing with it. (Kevin Bazzana)

Booklet for Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491 / Schoenberg: Piano Concerto, Op. 42 (Remastered)