Glenn Gould

Glenn Gould – Bach: Toccatas Vol. 1, BWV 910, 912 & 913 (1979/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 42:44 minutes | 378 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Sony Classical

On 1 April 1977, immediately after the Sibelius session, Eaton’s Auditorium was temporarily shut down for remodeling. Gould didn’t create another “take” for more than two years, but fortunately there were enough unreleased recordings stored in the ice-box, including these three Bach toccatas. On 25 April 1978 Gould renewed his exclusive contract with Columbia – for one last time …
(more…)

Glenn Gould – Bach: The Two and Three Part Inventions, BWV 772-801 (1964/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 50:08 minutes | 488 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Columbia Records/Sony Music

Gould’s first release after becoming a “concert drop-out.” For years he had put his Steinway CD 318 through myriad “operations” in order “to try to design an instrument […] which can add to the undeniable resource of the modern piano something of the clarity and tactile facility of the harpsichord.” The result was “a slight nervous tic in the middle register which in the slower passages can be heard emitting a sort of hiccup.” Indeed it can!
(more…)

Glenn Gould – Bach: The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (1982/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 51:17 minutes | 462 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Columbia Records/Sony Music

The last recording to appear in Gould’s lifetime, completing the discographical circle that had begun so spectacularly with the same work in 1955. “I would like to think that there is a kind of autumnal repose in what I’m doing, so that much of the music becomes a tranquilizing experience. It would be nice if what we do in the recorded state could involve the possibility of some degree of perfection, not purely of a technical order, but also of a spiritual order.”
(more…)

Glenn Gould – Bach: The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (1955 Rechannelled for Stereo) (1968/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 38:34 minutes | 361 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Sony Classical

The historic record debut re-channeled for stereo. “Gould’s Goldberg Variations are Bach as the old master himself must have played – with delight in speeding like the wind, joy in squeezing beauty out of every phrase, and all the freshness of the spring water which hypochondriac Gould used to wet his pipes.” – Time
(more…)

Glenn Gould – Bach: The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (1955 mono) (1956/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 38:33 minutes | 315 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Sony Classical

The Birth of a Legend: Gould’s first recording for Columbia, playing Bach as if someone had parted the curtains and thrown open the windows in a dark, stuffy room. The critics were ecstatic; the release broke all records and is still considered one of the ten most significant and successful classical recordings of all time.
(more…)

Glenn Gould – Bach: The French Suites Nos. 5 & 6, BWV 816 & 817 (1974/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 46:57 minutes | 454 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Sony Classical

Back to Bach, the composer of Gould’s two new releases of 1974. The same year was noted for other projects: Gould recorded a Schoenberg set and the first episode of a television series Music in Our Time, both for CBC, and he joined the French director Bruno Monsaingeon to create the fourpart Chemins de la musique for ORTF. The same year witnessed Gould’s only Grammy award—for his sleeve notes to the three Hindemith sonatas.
(more…)

Glenn Gould – Bach: The French Suites Nos. 1-4, BWV 812-815 (1973/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 39:00 minutes | 366 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Sony Classical

Besides Bach’s French Suites, Gould’s “artist contract cards” list the names of Mozart, Bizet, Skryabin, Wagner, and Hindemith. In short, he worked on six different recording projects in his studio at the same time, five of which were published simultaneously! Revealingly, his self-interview “Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould About Glenn Gould” originated at roughly the same time …
(more…)

Glenn Gould – Bach: The English Suites Nos. 1-6, BWV 806-811 (1977/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:51:59 minutes | 1,02 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Sony Classical

In June 1976, shortly after completing this recording, Gould suffered the first symptoms of a severe illness that began with difficulties of coordination and gradually affected his entire organism. Although he charted the illness in a journal, he never spoke to anyone about it: “It is quite poss., even likely, however, that it had a psychological base.” It had no noticeable impact on his piano playing.
(more…)

Glenn Gould – Bach: The Art of the Fugue, BWV 1080 (1962/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 30:54 minutes | 320 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Sony Classical

“Gould’s approach seems downright unmusical, and the image it evokes for me is of the trained seal who beeps out God Save the Queen on a set
of car horns.” Thus the miffed critic John Beckwith. It was to remain Gould’s only commercial recording on the organ; the remaining items in The Art of the Fugue are absent from his discography, as are the six Mendelssohn organ sonatas he intended to record afterwards.
(more…)

Glenn Gould – Bach: Preludes, Fughettas & Fugues (1980/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 40:43 minutes | 383 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Sony Classical

In December 1979 Gould’s longstanding producer Andrew Kazdin left Columbia. Gould produced his final recordings himself, beginning with this Bach album in January and February 1980. The cover shows Gould in the corner of a bare dilapidated room – more like the snapshot of a vagrant than the portrait of a pianistic genius. A doomsday scenario …
(more…)

Glenn Gould – Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, Preludes & Fugues Nos. 17-24, BWV 862-869 (1965/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 35:34 minutes | 334 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Sony Classical

Ever in search of the ideal sound: for a while Gould apparently planned to record the Well-Tempered Clavier on a “harpsipiano” (“a neurotic piano that thinks it’s a harpsichord”), but Columbia declined. What remained is a level of polyphonic lucidity and contrapuntal rigor that beggars comparison.
(more…)

Glenn Gould – Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, Preludes & Fugues Nos. 9-16, BWV 854-861 (1964/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 34:47 minutes | 339 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Sony Classical

Gould launched his complete recording of the “Pianists’ Old Testament” on 10 January 1962. It would eventually occupy him for more than nine years. “We recorded ten or even fifteen different versions of some of the preludes and fugues. Nearly every one was perfect, note for note, yet still completely different. It was an amazing experience to witness how each version became something completely new in Gould’s hands.”
(more…)

Glenn Gould – Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I, Preludes & Fugues Nos. 1-8, BWV 846-853 (1963/2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 38:03 minutes | 371 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Sony Classical

Gould launched his complete recording of the “Pianists’ Old Testament” on 10 January 1962. It would eventually occupy him for more than nine years. “We recorded ten or even fifteen different versions of some of the preludes and fugues. Nearly every one was perfect, note for note, yet still completely different. It was an amazing experience to witness how each version became something completely new in Gould’s hands.”
(more…)