5. Glenn GouldBrahms Intermezzi
What’s funny is that Glenn Gould avoided a lot of crowd-pleasing material, he avoided everything from Beethoven through to the Impressionists, so a pretty big chunk of what all piano players would play and he focussed on extreme modern stuff – he was a real champion of Schoenberg and the beginning of what I call ‘unlistenable music’. So what’s interesting is that he has this Brahms album, which is kind of an eyesore in his catalogue. He hardly played anything from that period and that composer, and in turns out that he made that record in his house on his own piano, and he essentially did it for a woman that he was in love with. I think it’s interesting that when it came time to get laid, Glenn Gould all of a sudden found reserves to do a certain kind of thing that he wasn’t able to do when he was just staying in his ivory tower.
I bought this music when I was 14 or 15 pretty much to find my place in society, aka get laid, you know? As with most musicians I know, it’s a way to get across – not just to get girls or get guys – it’s to fit in or to protect yourself. This album is very much, once Glenn Gould has passed up intellectualising reasons why he won’t do certain things, in the end, when he wanted to impress a woman, he was able to make an extremely intimate album, on which he takes a lot of liberties and really lets his hair down – what little hair he had left.
