Customer Reviews

Bach: 7 Toccatas BWV 910-916

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Before the Glenn Gould Edition was created, most of the Glenn Gould discography was availible on CBS recordings. The toccatas and the two and three part inventions were coupled together on two CD's, but apparently Sony Classical thought it would be better to take away the two and three part inventions from the set and sell it separately. This is the same company that turned the talentless Charlotte Church into a star and didn't allow Philips Classics to allow the best works of Glenn Gould in their "Great Pianists of the 20th century" series.

ANyhow, the toccatas are a particular favorite of mine. These are relatively early keyboard works of Bach, yet they somehow are one of his most dramatic outputs. Glenn Gould certainly brings these works to light.

I would like to bring attention to three stunning toccatas in particular the c-minor, e-minor, and d-minor.

The c-minor is a stunning display of counterpoint at the highest speed possible. My goodness, the final two sections of this toccata just has to be heard. The last section in particular has two subjects that are completely different, yet Gould manages to play it with an incredible discipline and control.

The e-minor is a joy to listen to and the last section of it is outstanding. The d-minor is a complete tour de force. It is a powerful work and it certainly allows Gould to take his time and essentially build up the tension until the final section where his counterpuntal mastery takes over to a sheer outburst of passion.

I've been a committed Glenn Gould fan for more than 20 years, listening to almost everything he ever recorded and reading deeply into the Gould literature. Generally I find his performances engrossing and stimulating. And I like these pieces: I play them myself on harpsichord and organ. They're not Bach's best work, but they're still effective if played with dramatic flair, like the music of Bohm and Buxtehude.

Within that context, I think Gould's set of the Bach Toccatas is far below his own phenomenal standards. Some of his recordings really deserve five stars, such as his WTC or his 1955 Goldbergs or his Brahms intermezzi or his Schoenberg. But this set is far from those. Dramatic and improvisatory pieces such as these just weren't Gould's cup of tea (or bottle of Poland water). He didn't like them, and he tried to make them into something they're not.

Gould's way with the e minor is the best of the set. He did this one in 1963 when he was still playing Bach more naturally than cerebrally (or deconstructively, or whatever). He uses subtle rubato, natural dynamic gradation, and conveys easy musicality. There is no especially odd ornamentation or affected arpeggiation. The performance flows well. The sound is dimmer than in the other toccatas, but the playing is so much more alive. This terrific performance shows that Gould *was* aware of the drama in the toccatas...he just chose to stop playing them that way later.

I can pretty well tolerate his performances of the G major, g minor, and c minor, all from 1979, though I'm not particularly excited about them either. His clarity and momentum go a long way toward projecting these pieces (it's one way to play them...). The performances are one-dimensional overall: rhythmically stiff and hard-driven. Yes, even the slow sections are stiff, and the c minor's second section is unbelievably slow. On the surface, the fast parts sound lively with Gould's aggressive articulation, but there are some long stretches of unvaried touch that get monotonous.

Now, the bad news: the rest of them, from 1976. The d minor is a boring performance (by Gould standards). I have listened to it repeatedly and still keep wandering away every time. Somehow it seems like a "contractual obligation" performance, like some of his Mozart. Gould doesn't sound particularly involved with or committed to the music, but merely gets all the notes with little inflection or direction. So what?

His performance of the D major is frustratingly anti-physical, and this is Bach's most obviously exuberant toccata! It needs the flash, the flourish, the panache. This is the Gould of the experimental Beethoven "Appassionata" of ten years earlier: he slows it way down, dissects it motivically, drains the lifeblood out of it. The result is interesting, but it's not Bach. And as with the "Appassionata," Gould spends the last few minutes halfway redeeming himself by playing cleanly and normally. If he was going to deconstruct the piece anyway, why not finish the job?

The f# minor is a willful mess. Gould pulls out his eccentric tricks that also plague the English Suites 3-6 and the violin sonatas (all his Bach from 1974-6!): artificial staccatos, extreme tempos, arbitrarily mannered arpeggiations, very measured trills. It's a display of excessive control and clever idiosyncracy rather than going with the flow and bigger gestures of the music. Even his rubato is stiff: he places every note, rather than letting them happen in natural groupings. And he omits 14 bars, presumably in an attempt to improve the composition! Technically, some of the splice points in fast sections are too obvious and distracting. Yes, the performance holds the attention, but there's just too much that's weird about it to convince me. (His recording with Leonard Rose of the viola da gamba sonatas is even weirder, but redeemed by being more playful.) The tricks were plentiful in the D major, too, but that one was already lost with his anti-dramatic approach. What was he thinking?

If I sound rough on Gould in my disenchantment with these performances, at least it's consistent: I think all his solo Bach recorded before 1970 is marvelous, but then it dropped off quickly after that. His style went around the bend there in the 1970's. It changed from "Bach's music as played by Glenn Gould" to "Glenn Gould's didactic ideas about Bach." It seemed that he stopped trusting Bach's ability to make points on his own. He started coloring the music with heavy fluorescent markers rather than simply playing it. Cerebral dissection replaced straightforward joy and physical expression. Naturally dynamic phrasing and articulation went out the window. Artifice replaced art.

Recorded over a span of 16 years, this set of the Toccatas is a microcosm of those changes in Gould's approach to Bach. He sounds like four different people here: one with a naturally musical style and a sense of fun playing Bach, but the other three too concerned with being Glenn Gould.

To sum up, I wish Gould had gone ahead with all seven of the toccatas in the mid-1960's when he recorded the e minor. This set could have been great, but it's just too uneven and bizarre to earn more than two stars.

As evidenced by the liner notes, Gould was not an admirer of these works and neglected them throughtout his career. And he is basically correct in considering them inferior to Bach's true keyboard masterworks. But you would never guess it by listening to these masterful performances. This 2-disc set offers some of the best playing of Gould's career; playing that is jaunty, powerful, technically polished, and, in the slow sections, deeply moving. Proof that less than great music can be performed greatly.

Listen to the cycle three times and you will be hooked! At times it sounds almost like New Age Music. Many of the melodies are haunting and beautiful. If Gould thought the Toccatas to be inferior, you would never detect that my his masterful playing. My only wish what that all of his amazing recordings were done today so we would have the advantage of more modern recording techniques.

Sony Classical bought CBS Records a number of years ago, and they have wasted no time in repackaging Glenn Gould's recordings to effectively raise the cost to the consumer. These CDs illustrate the point. Before Sony entered the picture, CBS offered the complete Bach Toccatas, complete Two-Part Inventions, and complete Three-Part Inventions on 2 CDs. Sony removed the Inventions from the set, leaving you with the Toccatas alone at the same price! The Inventions are still available from Sony, but now on a separate CD. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that two CBS CDs (plus nothing more) = three Sony CDs, in effect a 50% price hike. Which is music to Sony's ears, no doubt.

Five stars for Glenn Gould, no stars for Sony.

*

As a young man (aetat. 20), Bach began work on his Toccatas (BWV 910-16) almost immediately after his meeting with Buxtehude (October, 1705).

Bach's Toccatas are fairly large works which obtain between two to six sections--(not `movements', as in the Suites or Partitas).

The Toccata sections generally follow a sequence of,
i) rhapsody
ii) arioso - recitativo
iii) fughetta
iv) adagio
v) fugue.

However, the middle sections are ofttimes conflated, reversed, or omitted, resulting in a form which connotes an overall improvisatory fantasia of significancy, thusly rendering Bach's Toccatas as very strange and fascinating works of youthful energy.

Contemporaneous with these early clavier Toccatas are of course the five great organ Toccatas, BWV 538 (d-minor `Dorian'); 540 (F-major); 564 (C-major); 565 (d-minor); and 566 (E-major).

Bach did on occasion throughout his artistic career return to the genre: specifically, in certain of the Preludes of the Well-Tempered Clavier (1722)--No. 2 (c-minor, BWV 847); No. 7 (Eb-major, BWV 852); and No. 21 (Bb-major, BWV 866).

Bach's last Toccata finds its place as the extraordinary first movement of the late e-minor Partita (BWV 830), published in Clavier-Übung I of 1731.

*
It's easier to tear a thing down than it is to build a thing up: churlish ingratitude is the essence of childish ignorance; critical maturity engenders a gracious spirit: withal, complaints of Bach's youthful ineptitude (or Gould's `eccentric' interpretations) are the puke of babies' pabulum.

Brats needs must wipe their bottoms afore they approach Art.
*

In conclusion, Gould's inconceivably superb realizations of these Bachian Toccatas--with their alternating sections of spellbinding rhapsody, mesmerizing ariso-recitativo, and polyphonic fugues--rank among his most striking and memorable performances.

*

BWV 914 originally recorded and issued in 1963.

BWV 910, 912-13 recorded in 1976; BWV 911, 915-16 recorded in 1979.

Complete set originally issued as Volume 1 (1979) and Volume 2 (1980).

This two CD 20-bit remastered Glenn Gould Edition issue (1994) retains the track sequence of the original two Volumes.
*

Gould probably had his personal list of Bach pieces he didn't particularly care for (that is, as much as the GV or the Art of the Fugue) - Chromatic Fantasy, Italian Concerto, the keyboard concertos, and these toccatas. Yet, his recordings of these "disdained" pieces are often very interesting.

These toccatas are somewhat uneven - you don't know what surprises Gould's going to pull out of his oversized coat after the next fermata. In general, the fugal passages are brilliant, stunning, revelatory, and carry an almost religious sort of clarity. But the improvisational passages sound forced, pedantic, and over-analyzed.

One reviewer professes that he found the D minor toccata "boring." I disagree. I thought it was the highlight of the set. I don't like hyperbolizing, but the final allegro section of the D minor is probably my favorite 4-minute passage of Bach. Glenn Gould + Profuse Contrapuntalism = Life is Good.

Some of the other pieces are more problematic. The D major Vivace is put through the usual introspective analysis that leaves it dried and charred, sounding more like a dry dissertation than the Happy Music it's supposed to be. Reminds me of Gould's quite unlistenable late Beethoven sonatas. As an (inferior) pianist I also "disagree" with most of his extreme tempi and dynamics. I believe dynamical extremes (like the ppp-f contrasts that occur throughout) aren't appropriate for Bach. Nonetheless, I accept that as Gould's style. I'll take his boldness and provocation over textbook-correctness any day.

Glenn Gould's playing is not for everyone, and even I, so infatuated with him upon my first discovery of him, would have to admit that I have lost my taste for a lot of his stuff. It's too rarefied, too demanding, too harsh, much of the time. After having listened to Glenn Gould recordings from various parts of his discography for the last twelve years or so, I probably would have to admit a preference for the chaste, dry humor of someone like Alfred Brendel or the athleticism of Daniel Barenboim.

That is not to gainsay the impression this two-disc set made at first. It was absolutely spectacular -- there was the exoticism and the bizarre time signatures of the first toccata on the program, the D Major, BWV 912. There was the withdrawn, inward-turning e minor (BWV 914), and the glorious G major (BWV 916). One hardly knew what to marvel at, Bach's harmonic and linear facility, or Gould's magical touch.

At first, as well, I was able to ignore what, in retrospect, should have been a fairly large warning sign -- the liner notes. In these, Gould's hatred of the pieces is examined at some length. Gould goes on about Bach's "harmonic turgidity", and repeated statements of theme in the tonic key. At the time, bowled over by the performances themselves, I thought the notes nothing more than a strange joke by a strange man. This was not the case.

The fact is, Gould, for all of his shyness about performing live, was actually the biggest monomaniac who ever lived. His own personality is writ large over these performances. The piano has never sounded more like "a piano being played by Glenn Gould" than it has here (that dry, clanking, skeletal tone, the utter detachment between notes).

This does not take away from his talent -- in the final analysis, Gould was supernaturally gifted, both in terms of dexterity and coordination, and ability to hear and sense infinitesimal changes in pitch and tempo (almost as though he had a bat's sense of hearing). All that he lacked was a little taste, or perhaps a strong hand (a mentor, perhaps?) to guide him out of the shallows here and there. But, armed with such prodigious technique, whom would he listen to? Gould's disdain for other great pianists (Horowitz, for instance) is as legendary as his technique.

Ultimately, his playing, much like his bizarre, autistic persona, can only be endured in relatively small doses.