Guess I]'ll have to get the Zenph for myself---a lot of dissention among the reviews. I don't find the 1955 Goldberg sound unlistenable in the SOny remaster (in the "Original Jacket" collection) but the 1981 performance is much deeper on the emotional and spiritual level. It should be----Gould was nearly 30 years older and possessed of much deeper insight and approached the variations with much greater ability to limn them with (as he put it at the time) "some degree of perfection, not purely of a technical order, but of a spiritual order". In the Sony collection, there is a CD of his interview with Tim Page about the 1981 Goldbergs, I will listen to it tonight and see if it offers some clear info about his perception of the differences between the 1955 and 1981 recordings.
Gould: "I would like to think that there a kind of autumnal repose in what I am doing, so that much of the music becomes a tranquillizing experience".....he perhaps had an inkling that his life was coming to a close. His intention was, at 50, to stop performing on the piano and turn to conducting.
One of the reviews of the "recreation":
First the good news. The recording quality is better than the original.
Then the not so good news. In despite of all the technology too little of Glenn Gould found its way into the stream of zeros and ones on this disc. In addition, the piano has a very different sonic signature than Glenn's Steinway and this recording's miking differed significantly from the one the Canadian used throughout his Bach recordings.
Listening to this recording made me think of one of those old Star Trek episodes where something went wrong in Scotty's attempt of beaming someone up. Superficially, everything seems to be there and in the right place, but the original soul is no longer there. To me most of what made this recording great and Gould so special got lost in the elaborate process of recreation. The extras provide little in the way of compensation.
While this recreation may have used the most technologically advanced approach, older technology like piano rolls -I am thinking here of the Rachmaninov reissue on Telarc about a decade- and player piano -at its very best with D. Hyman's recordings for Prof. Johnson- yielded far more involving results than this disc. Based on the Hyman experience, this suggests that most got lost in the processing of the original recording to the piano programming.
Although the geek in me still thinks that there is a lot of promise in this approach, I infinitely prefer the rather poorly sounding original. Similarly, this elaborate and expensive process, at this stage of its evolution, will likely add little to the oldies from the 78 RPM era that may lack sonics, but are high on soul.
Glenn Gould???
Not even close.
