GG does Strauss!...
Sébastien Melmoth | Hôtel d'Alsace, PARIS | 07/16/2006
(5 out of 5 stars)
"
The real star here is Strauss' Burleske. It's something like Lizst's first piano concerto: a portmanteau one-movement piece comprised of contrasting episodes. Strauss' piece has the humorous vein of Til Eulenspegiel's Merry Pranks. Gould sounds great, and it's really a wonderful realization of a rarity. Quite a substantial piece, it runs about 24 mins.
The Beethoven is okay. GG plays it very "straightly"--so much so, in fact, that Bazzana dispairages it as "conventional": faint praise indeed. Recorded in 1970 for CBC TV, the orchestra sounds very flat and two-dimentional; Gould's piano, however, sounds okay.
It's just such a damned shame that the recorded sound of GG's radical realization of Brahms' first concerto with Bernstein (1962) is too bad to tolerate, for Gould's performance was truly exquisite and superb.
As mentioned, this disc is worth having for GG's Strauss."