GLENN GOULD PLAYS… BRAHMS

(This entry talks about the famous-- or should I say infamous?!-- April 6, 1962 performance of the Brahms Piano Concerto #1 in d minor by Glenn Gould, bravely conducted by a distraught Leonard Bernstein, who, in effect, disavowed this performance by giving a little cautionary speech to the live audience, before the first bar was played. It was an incredibly unorthodox rendering of Brahms, although, ironically, it was not the first time that Gould was playing this Concerto, and all previous performances had been… well, traditional. I cannot say, though, that this particular version beats all others in my aesthetic mind. I have always loved Gilels’s, or John Ogdon’s, for instance, but, I guess, this one, by Gould, being one of the most scandalous events in the history of live music performances, elicits a very special reaction, and so, here it is…

…Is this about Glenn Gould or Brahms? Perhaps, I should have titled this entry Tischreden?…

This is, of course, about both of them fused together into one entry. My strong personal impressions of the great Glenn Gould had to find a place among these entries, aside from a rather fleeting honorable mention he receives in passim elsewhere, as I had that one chance to see him in person and hear him play--- unforgettably--- in his legendary concert in 1957 in Moscow… I was nine years old at the time, but already a passionate music lover…)

Glenn Gould is rightfully credited as an incomparable performer of Bach, yet this entry is not about Gould’s Bach, but about his very unusual rendering of the Brahms First Piano Concerto in d minor, and so here it is where Brahms enters our picture.

Brahms was a very late bloomer, and this Concerto, written at the precocious age of twenty-five, happens to be one of his earliest serious compositions. I first heard this monumental Concerto live during the inaugural Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, in 1958, and I was deeply impressed by it. I remember calling it “the Creation of the World” hearing the rumbles of chaos and almost seeing the blinding flashes of Divine Light piercing that chaos in the process of the Divine construction. Regardless of the mixed reviews which critics have given it, this Concerto remains one of my favorite pieces of music, which list, I ought to note, includes a rather sizeable number of pieces.

And so, here is where the incomparable Glenn Gould reenters my story, which is now a Brahms story, and becomes a necessary part of it. Ironically, it is his weird, outrageously unorthodox, “stone age,” as I would call it, reading of the First Brahms Concerto, which, of all the performances which I have heard, live or on tape (alas, this one I’ve heard on tape only, but, happily, numerous times) happens to be the most consistent with my own first impression, and, therefore, gives me the highest satisfaction of all great performances of it that I have ever heard, despite a number of more traditional versions, which I have enjoyed in their own right. It is Gould’s playing of Brahms that has become one of my most cherished syntheses of the composer and the performer. Another such sublime synthesis, but in a more conventional sense, is David Oistrakh’s rendering of Jean Sibelius’s immortal Violin Concerto in d minor… but that is another story…