Glenn Gould's Only Major Composition
J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 04/09/2009
(4 out of 5 stars)
"The headliner on this disc is the String Quartet of Glenn Gould, his Opus 1, his only numbered opus and his only major work, written in the early 1950s just before his meteoric rise as a wildly popular and wholly original pianist. It is a thirty-three minute-long single movement that partakes of the compositional style of such post-romantic composers as the early Schoenberg whose string sextet, Verklärte Nacht, is clearly its model. There is dense counterpoint with constantly evolving harmonies which while based clearly in F Minor have a tendency to wander far afield. It is in roughly five parts: introduction and exposition, development (a fugue in the quite distant key of B Minor), altered introduction and exposition, and a final fugue with a huge 300-measure coda. The work is filled with intriguing ideas cheek-by-jowl with almost laughable young-composer 'mistakes' including unidiomatic string writing, awkward transitions and a seeming inability to bring the thing to a close. For all that, though, it is at times hypnotic and certainly a fascinating view into the mind of one of the great musicians of his age. It is played in slightly underpowered style by the Quatuor Alcan, a group made up of the principals of the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean Symphony Orchestra, a regional orchestra based in Chicoutimi in the rather remote area due north of Québec City.
There was a recording of the Gould Quartet, made under the composer's supervision, back in the early 1960s by the Symphonia Quartet. I think it is still available. I haven't heard it in years, but my recollection is that it makes the quartet seem more, how shall I say, coherent than the Alcan's version. Still, I think one can get a feeling for what Gould intended from the present recording.
The remaining works on this disc are the String Quartet in C Minor (1914, rev. 1921) and Two Sketches for String Quartet based on French Canadian Airs (1927) by the important and revered Canadian composer/conductor Sir Ernest MacMillan, conductor for more than thirty years of the Toronto Symphony. The Quartet, written by MacMillan at age twenty-one while studying in Germany, is an interesting mix of French impressionist and early twentieth-century British styles, the latter reminiscent of early Frank Bridge or even Edward Elgar. The Two Sketches, based on songs collected by two Canadian anthropologists, is perhaps better known in its orchestral version.
Scott Morrison
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