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Rating: The self-interview was one of the most recurring quirks of Glenn Gould's bizarre genius. Often, the liner notes of his albums included these learned and at the same time entertaining "interviews," in which Glenn Gould responded to characters like the German composer Karlheinz Klopweisser or the English conductor Sir Nigel Twitt-Thornwaite, impersonated by himself. Entirely surreal is the interview that accompanies this double record dedicated to Brahms: here the questions are posed by a certain "glenn gould" (lowercase), who more or less represents what people expect to hear from him, while the responses are given by Glenn Gould (uppercase), the real one, who consistently surprises the poor "glenn gould" with remarks verging on irreverence, oscillating between burlesque and serious. Yet, amid the various cultured or less so nonsequiturs, there emerges quite seriously an unexpected attention to romantic music from the great Canadian pianist, albeit intermittently and with long periods of stasis. In fact, the recordings of romantic pianists that the uppercase Glenn Gould cites would be enough on their own to disprove the cliché that sees him as a fundamentalist of counterpoint, a Taliban of the fugue, always engaged in the stubborn veneration of Bach. However, even the romantic Glenn Gould does it his own way, and it is no coincidence that among the nineteenth-century authors he frequented, Johannes Brahms stands out, fully romantic from an expressive point of view, but at the same time strictly faithful to the music of the past, which for him meant Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and especially Bach, who had almost fallen into oblivion in the early 1800s.
Precisely that Brahms who opposed the chromatic excesses of Berlioz and, later on, the theatrical revolution of Wagner and his imitators, as well as the virtuosic style full of broad gestures of the pianist-showman Franz Liszt. Thus, the pieces begin to fit together: Glenn Gould, among the romantics, favored the driest, most rigorous, unadorned one, and in albums like this, he "treated" it in his own way, stripping it of almost every possible embellishment, revealing to us the architecture, albeit mighty and complex, of his music, just as with Bach's. Naturally, one cannot expect to hear the same dry and essential sound of a piano played like a harpsichord, but comparisons with pianists more faithful to the author show that even with Brahms, the resonances, the legatos, and other tricks that Gould dismissively called "pianistic" are reduced to a minimum, and the most surprising thing is that this does not seem to significantly damage the typically "romantic" charm of Brahms' music, its ability to evoke strong emotions. For example, the burst of tears placed at the center of the stunning Ballad No. 1 Op. 10, here seems represented by a powerful and dry salvo of closely spaced but well-separated notes, instead of the thunderous cascade we would have expected. This salvo emerges from an initial whisper so timid and uncertain that it approaches silence and passes without leaving an echo, to once more give way to the gloomy "murmur" that began it. It is known that this ballad is inspired by an ancient Scottish traditional song ("Edward"), in which a young man confesses to his mother that he murdered his father, and the central outburst represents precisely the dramatic memory of the act. But even in the other three ballads of this intense youthful work, the alternation between dreamlike phases and harsher, more dramatic episodes is often revisited, which Glenn Gould promptly highlights with "cool-headed outbursts" of a style not dissimilar to the first. For the third, after all, the author himself advised to "not highlight the melody too much," and one could say Gould took him literally. With the 10 Intermezzos, we reach the other extreme of Brahms' life, in every sense. Apart from the two of Op. 76, they belong to that kind of "pianistic testament" that spans from Op. 116 to 119, four cycles containing also various other pieces (Capriccios, Ballads, Romances, etc.). It is curious that among these jewels, which the old Brahms called the "lullaby of my pain," Gould chose only those named "Intermezzos," but it is precisely among these that some of the most beautiful expressions music has ever given to that calm resignation of one who has already made an accounting of their life appear, that senile and autumnal calm which, however, is not too distant from the "serene melancholy" of someone like Schubert, who never reached old age.
It is obligatory to at least mention the three Intermezzos Op. 117, with their constant elegiac and subdued tone, but with the underlying sensation of a fire of passion ready to reignite. Something that happens in the marvelous central phrasing of Intermezzo No. 2 Op. 118, which in some ways recalls the poignant musical love declarations of a much younger Brahms, the one of the Piano and String Quartets. A passion that finds an outlet in torrents of tears in the melancholic Intermezzo No. 6 Op. 118. Needless to say, Glenn Gould handles these delicate sentiments with his characteristic sobriety, without assaulting them with spectacular effects, but it is precisely for this reason that these sentimental vignettes appear even purer. Only in the 2 Rhapsodies Op. 79 does he yield for a moment to the temptation to play "like a pianist," in a way he doesn't like, and the thing is, he does it superbly well, even without overdoing it. After all, these two lively and colorful works of Brahms' maturity in the album's plan were supposed to form some sort of filler to reach an appropriate duration, although it is crazy to think that two pieces of this kind, and played in this way, were conceived as "fillers." But with Glenn Gould anything was possible: whether he played Brahms, did it his way, or, if he felt like it, in another way. In any case, the result was of a constant perfection, and this album is yet another confirmation of it.
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