Recordings: Good as Gould

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Last week in Toronto, that happy hypochondriac Glenn Gould was busy coming down with the flu, having dizzy spells, getting massaged, guarding his private life, and communicating with the world, as usual, only by telephone.

Everywhere, however, his latest batch of recordings—five, all told—were pouring forth like gabby world travelers, which indeed they are. Four years after his withdrawal from public concert life, Pianist Gould is still pursuing one of the most remarkable careers in recording history. First, there is his initial installment of Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, dazzlingly executed, imaginatively shaped, proving more than ever that while Gould's Bach is invariably different from anybody else's, it invariably has its own kind of rightness. Then there are Mozart's first five piano sonatas, which he spins out in enthusiastic, masculine, superclassical style. This performance helps offset Gould's hyperbolical habit of denouncing Mozart in interviews ("Anyone who has to write 28 symphonies before he can write a good one can't be much of a musician").

Liszt's Fifth by Beethoven. In his concert days, when he was not singing along, Gould liked to conduct himself with whichever hand he could free at any moment. So it is not surprising that he has finally got around to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The piano transcription was written by Keyboard Demon Franz Liszt, meaning that both hands are too busy for shenanigans. Gould plays it in respectful dedication to both Liszt and Beethoven. The Fifth is largely free of Liszt's frequent pianistic bombastics and remarkably faithful to the original—save for an occasional missing dissonance. "Liszt removed them," says Gould, "to safeguard his reputation as the man who never pulled a false note."

Rounding out the package are the Schoenberg piano works, which Gould plays with the sense of divine order and mystery that Gieseking used to bring to Debussy; an excellent stereo rechanneling of the album that launched Gould's recording career 13 years ago, the Goldberg Variations ("In those days, my tempi were souped up and rather breakneck"); and a conversation LP in which he admits that his nine years as a recitalist were "rather unpleasant, rather traumatic." In the time since, Gould says that he has had "four of the best years of my life." It hasn't been bad for his record fans, either.