Customer Reviews

Best of Goulds Bach

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If you like Bach and Gould, this is a great CD to start out on, it covers a large variety of recordings by Glenn Gould, and is a great introduction to Bach. Overall this CD is a wonderful sampler, it'll make you want to go out and buy all of his Bach CD's. You wont regret buying this CD, it's something to cherish for years.

The "best of Glenn Gould's Bach" is a strange subtitle for a strange sampler. Coming several years after the Sony re-issues of remastered Gould recordings, this collection seems either belated or superfluous. Arguably, the selections don't even represent highlights from the corpi Gould tackled over the years. A disproportionate amount of space is given to relative obscurities, e.g. Aria Variata for keyboard ("in the Italian style"). Surely a legitimate "best of" would include a few more preludes/fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier? Also, the pace of the music over the length of the first disc is almost relentlessly brisk, like a treasury of vintage Dixieland piano rolls. The second disc is interesting as it includes 1 entire LP - Gould's performance on organ of 9 fugues from The Art of Fugue - plus videos of Gould performing fugues on piano. Consequently, while this set is not truly a "best of," it's a valuable collection of oddities and rarities and a worthwhile investment.

this collection is a sampling of glenn gould's bach recordings, relying heavily on his 1955 edition of the goldberg variations and keeping in total the art of the fugue which gould recorded on organ. i would recommend the complete editions of each recording sampled here, but for an introduction to mr. gould and for a nice selection of bach piano, this album suffices.