Music : Byrd/Gibbons/Sweelinck: Keyboard Works

Rating: - Virginal pleasures
Ever the eccentric, Glenn Gould numbered the mainly choral composer, Orlando Gibbons, as hit all time favourite. This album of Elizabethan music containd works by Gibbons, Byrd and a specialist Gould encore, the Sweelinck fantasia. Just to say you could hardly ever expect to hear more mesmerising playing - listen to Sellinger's round or any of the other pieces. The trills are absolutely superb in their control. The recording is good apart from the Sweelinck, which is taken from a live concert. But just listen to it and you will see why Gould mesmerised a sceptical audience in his American debut. Unmissable!

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Rating: - Inspirational Gould
Gould's often cited his favourite composer was Orlando Gibbons. I think he found the uncluttered simplicity of Gibbons very close to his own aesthetic. Discussing Byrd, he saw him as the dashing, exuberant cousin, very much a public man contrasting Gibbons' intimate modesty. Having been brought up in the Anglican tradition Gould no doubt was exposed to Elizabethan music in the church services of his youth. He said he wore out two LP copies of Alfred Deller's recording Gibbons' Services. This for him was music stripped of all the stresses of the modern world, a place to seek refuge.

That he came to record a disc of Elizabethan music is hardly surprising. Byrd's flashing counterpoint sits so perfectly in Gould's hands, as ever the crystalline precision of playing sounds thrilling in this music. Gibbon's brings a more inward, contemplative approach. Clearly Gould is in some private ecstasy with this music. There's an intensely spiritual dimension to his playing on this disc, one finds it at times in his Bach, but here its intense and all the more moving.

Most Gould fans rate this disc as one of his finest. Moreover its so different to what we've come to expect from a pianist! A disc for dark winter evenings, for meditation and for the soul.

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Rating: - Glenn Gould, Man in Tights!!
By all rights, this recording should have made but a small mark in the history of piano recordings: virginal music played on a Steinway! Yet on account of Glenn Gould's pianistic genius, Byrd, Gibbons & Sweelinck come across as improvisatory, almost modern in some of the variations. Gibbons' Pavan & Galliard has a darkness that piano tone fully exploits, with some astonishing runs in the Galliard, further demonstrated in Sweelinck's haunting Fantasia. Byrd's First Pavan & Galliard reveals Gould as "lutenist" rolling chords imperiously! The piano sound seems ideal: rich but without heaviness. Only the Sweelinck has inferior sound, but anyone who witnessed this television broadcast was surely priviliged, mono sound or not! Of course Gould's clarity & rhythmic control are ideal in such music: Hughe Ashton's Ground would be difficult to bring off in less accomplished hands, but Gould delights in such an ornamented piece.
So we have another unlikely success from the Glenn Gould Edition....don't think he recorded any Hildegard of Bingen. Shame!