Customer Rating: 
Summary: Classic...but uneven. Perhaps 4.5 stars.
Comment: I've cherished Glenn Gould's Bach Partitas since I first found it from my father's old LP collection many years ago. I've listened to it ridiculosly many times in all formats--cassettes, CDs, and MP3s. (I now always carry it in my iPhone.) Gould's fiendishly exuberant playing is of course classic. He is most successful in Partitas 1 and 4. But his overall playing is uneven, and the recording sound itself is uneven, too. His Sinfonia in Partia 2 is ugly. His Praeambulum in Partita 5 is too fast; Toccata in Partita 6 is too slow and ponderous. For modern interpretations of Bach Partitas on piano, those by Craig Sheppard and Sharon Mann are good. (Sharon Mann's playing sounds somehwat Gouldish, even though she was once a student of Rosalyn Tureck.) For partial Partitas, Arrau(1,2,3,5), Argerich(2), Tomsic(1) are very good. For a slow interpretation, there always is Tureck (Philips and VAI).
Customer Rating: Summary: Twenty years after, the genius still keeps shining!
Comment: The approach of Mr. Gould around Bach's music has always generated encountered positions. Many people regard him fascinating, irreverent and original, while others critic him his daring positions, his forced canto over the melodic line and literally don't forgive him his refuse to have cancelled his public appearances since 1964.
But what we should notice and always to keep in mind resides in the fact was, whether or not he got to clean the intellectual patina around Bach's music. To be honest, Casals was the first foreigner artist who waited for years and years the accurate moment to play Bach's suites for cello, too according another style and point of view. But what both have in common is to have allowed a very vast portion of human beings to have got to get close them to Bach's music.
That emerging generation of the ashes of the WW2 found in Gould an icon of the art of playing piano; he was for the academic music what
Marlon Brando for the new cinema, Orson Welles for Shakespeare or Elvis for a new emerging musical tendency by then, The Rock.
Nobody like him knew to establish a breakthrough respect the formalism that surrounded the classic music, he really was an outlaw, a distant brother of James Dean in what concerns to express himself and furthermore, to convey with rotund success the immense delight and pleasure to listen Bach's Goldberg Variations. This album in 1955 meant a true hitherto, "a before and an after" in the history of the great music.
Maybe if we take a backward glance we should argue that Busoni would have made similar emotive impact in the great masses of listeners.
Glenn Gould (1932) generation was really unsurpassable ; Michelangeli (1920), Kapell (1922) Badura Skoda (1927) preceded him within a short difference of years among all of them among these four distinguished musicians.
So, regardless your previous opinion about Gould's phenomena, we have to admit he incorporated (and still on) a new generation of young people who has been born under his spelling legend.
