Glenn Gould born 25 September 1932

Glenn Gould (September 25, 1932 - October 4, 1982) was a Canadian pianist known for his contrapuntal clarity and brilliant, if often unorthodox, performances. At age 31, on April 10, 1964, he gave his last public performance, at Los Angeles’s Wilshire Ebell Theater. He never married and was known to walk city streets alone at late hours. 

Glen Herbert Gould was born in Toronto and enjoyed a privileged, sheltered upbringing in the quiet Beach neighbourhood. He studied piano from the age of 3, began composing at 5, and entered the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto at 10, earning its associate degree in 1946. He became a professional concert pianist at age 15, 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. Favouring 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-20th-century music. Bach and Schoenberg were central to his aesthetic and repertoire. 

In 1952 Gould isolated himself and, working only with a tape recorder, developed an individual style of playing with his head hunched over the keyboard. 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 sustain pedal, using détaché articulation, for example. 

          Here’s “Variation 24 A1 Canone All’Ottova” from above album 

                               

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. The quality of his performances of Bach’s keyboard works was probably unrivaled in the 20th century. 

In 1964 he gave up a successful concert career to work exclusively in the recording studio as performer, editor, and producer of his own recordings. His retirement was 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, the influential intellect, 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 life, and guarded his privacy. 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 but, shortly after his 50th birthday, Gould died suddenly of a stroke. Among the numerous honours conferred upon him was a lifetime achievement award from the Recording Academy, presented posthumously in 2013. 

 (Edited from The Canadian Music Hall of Fame & Britannica)