Bach Partita BWV 825: Menuets 1 & 2
A Canadian Miracle: Glenn Gould
It is said that J. S. Bach wrote his keyboard partitas when his career as a church musician had gone wrong:
they became the foundation for a massive composite work in which he explored every aspect of the 18th-century precursor to the piano.
Piano: Glenn Gould (1932 - 1982)
Recorded:at New York CBS Studio in July, 1959
Glenn Gould (1932-1982), was born in Toronto, Ontario, and studied at the Toronto Royal Conservatory of Music from the age of 10 and made his professional performance debut with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra just two years later. In 1955 he made his New York City debut. The same year he recorded the Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach, a recording that established Gould's fame, and a reputation for compelling, unsentimental playing.
Gould performed in Europe for the first time in 1957, with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. He then toured extensively in Europe and the USSR to great acclaim. However, in 1964 Gould gave up public performance altogether, in order to concentrate on recording, which he firmly believed was the direction that music-making would and should take in the future. Gould's principal legacy was his performances of Bach (he recorded virtually all of Bach's non-organ keyboard music), and one of his last projects was a second recording of the Goldberg Variations (1982).
Gould's love of counterpoint and his fascination with recording techniques came together in three remarkable radio documentaries on the subject of solitude. Gould created these documentaries by interweaving the voices of people he had interviewed (omitting his own voice) so that they appeared to be in conversation with each other, or talking over each other.