Mozart: The Piano Sonatas, Vol. II 2
Throughout his career, Glenn Gould exhibited a haughty disdain for Mozart's music, on one occasion going so far as to say that Mozart died too late rather than too soon. Any lover of Mozart's music, confronted with these recordings of the piano sonatas, could well be tempted to say the same thing about Gould. The playing is willful and self-indulgent, characterized by outrageous exaggerations of tempo and dynamics and a meticulous, cold-blooded, and gleeful mockery of Mozart's style. It's as if a superintelligent 3-year-old with the technique of an angel had decided to have fun. Gould plays the opening of K. 331 as a chord study, at less than half the appropriate tempo, daring us to hear it as a dance. Elsewhere, his playing is merely an accompaniment to seemingly spontaneous cascades of humming and vocalizing, Gould's way of reminding us that he's playing not for us, not for Mozart, but for himself.Yet, in spite of all the roadblocks, one hears the most extraordinary fingers of the 20th century accomplishing things in these accounts that might have astonished even Mozart, and one begins to understand what Gould was talking about when he said these pieces offered a kind of "tactile pleasure." If that floats your boat, then these readings are for you. And if it gets your goat, well, Gould will be remembered and admired for other things, and Mozart will survive even this travesty.--Ted Libbey