Today, Sept. 25, 2012, would have marked the 80th birthday of Glenn Gould, and Oct. 4 is the 30th anniversary of his death. One can only wonder what Gould might have done had he lived a full life — he had many plans and spoke of them with customary enthusiasm — but I have no doubt that he would have loved the internet above all. Can you imagine an unfettered Gould finally able to remove the middlemen and record whatever he wanted, as often as he wanted to, and immediately share the results with his audience?
Gould is most famous, now and likely always, for his two studio recordings of Bach's Goldberg Variations, which served as alpha and omega for his career (it was the first work he recorded for Columbia Masterworks in 1955 and a second version came out the week he died in 1982). But there is more to Gould than the "Gouldbergs" — indeed, more to him than Bach — and this seems a logical time to explore some of his other great recordings.
(Pulitzer Prize-wining critic and University of Southern California professor Tim Page was befriended by Glenn Gould late in the pianist's life, and later collected his writings in The Glenn Gould Reader.)
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