You mean Glenn Gould, the composer? Well, he was always too big a personality to fit in a pair of pianist socks. In his teens the Canadian genius tried his hand at various small scores, none of them satisfying his restless self.
The first composition to warrant an opus number was a half-hour string quartet, finished in 1955 when he was 23 and premiered the following year in Montreal. Gould, by now, was a soaring star and four members of the Cleveland Orchestra hastened to record the single-movement quartet for CBS Records, which forgot to promote it. Gould, in later years, admitted that he lacked a ‘personal voice’ as a composer. The string quartet is proof of that. There would never be a Gould opus 2.
Read Full Article »