Glenn Gould treats Salzburg to a Schoenberg suite
Daily Comfort ZoneAt the Salzburg Festival on August 25, 1959 Gould played Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Mozart Sonata K.330 and a Sweelinck piece.
He then shocked the Nazi-thick audience with Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano opus 25.
Take that.
The rare recording was recently uploaded by Daniel Poulin.
The Nazi thick audience?
What the actual?????
Schönberg’s music got regularly programmed at the Salzburg Festival only from the 1970s on.
Glenn Gould’s 1959 recital was only the 5th Festival concert ever to include works by Schönberg. The Suite for Piano opus 25 was previously performed in a 1928 recital by the Swiss pianist Oskar Ziegler, in the first Salzburg Festival concert to include Schönberg.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Ziegler
Hearing this composition properly for the first time, it’s fascinating to find connections with jazz, Shostakovich, and Mussorgsky, together with recognizing my personal preference for poly-modalism over atonality, if not always easy to differentiate. I especially enjoyed Schoenberg’s rhythms and percussive articulations here. Mel Powell once quizzed a composition class I was in with 10 musical examples we had to determine were either atonal or abstractly tonal music, myself luckily scoring 10 for 10. Powell was a jazz pianist who became a composer, of course, studying under Hindemith. Developing an approach for improvising on jazz standards finds me navigating a sea of dissonance together with sirens of consonance calling over the waves. Needless to say, a great rendition by Glenn Gould here, always my favorite classical pianist since first hearing him play the Bach Inventions while a teenager, though I retain a fondness for Rubinstein with Chopin, and Horowitz with Scarlatti.
http://azuremilesrecords.com/intheboothwithphilschaap.html
http://azuremilesrecords.com/momentousphrasemoment.html
Great stuff!
Nazi-thick audience? Well, on August 16 of that year, Bernstein and the New York Phil. made their debut there with works by Barber, Shostakovitch and the same Bernstein.
Nazi-thick in 1959? Ah Stormin’ Norman…
I’m not a nazi but I find this piece as awful as any nazi will have found.
It sounds like a caricature of music. Thus it will have sounded for audiences in the twenties, and it still sounds like a caricature. In that sense, the music has not aged.
To enjoy it, you have to be as neurotic as the music, and certainly this is the secret of Gould’s understanding, and it will be a correct explanation of enthusiastic listeners. Recognizing how you secretly feel inside always is a pleasurable experience.
Hearing this composition properly for the first time, it’s fascinating to find connections with jazz, Shostakovich, and Mussorgsky, together with recognizing my personal preference for poly-modalism over atonality, if not always easy to differentiate. I especially enjoyed Schoenberg’s rhythms and percussive articulations here. Mel Powell once quizzed a composition class I was in with 10 musical examples we had to determine were either atonal or abstractly tonal music, myself luckily scoring 10 for 10. Powell was a jazz pianist who became a composer, of course, studying under Hindemith. Developing an approach for improvising on jazz standards finds me navigating a sea of dissonance together with sirens of consonance calling over the waves. Needless to say, a great rendition by Glenn Gould here, always my favorite classical pianist since first hearing him play the Bach Inventions while a teenager, though I retain a fondness for Rubinstein with Chopin, and Horowitz with Scarlatti.