Imperious and wistful, authoritarian and whimsical, idiosyncratic yet creating his own ambience and lucidity, mischievous yet of the fiercest integrity, Gould continues to mesmerize and provoke. Suitably subtitled “Endgame” or “Finale”, and with apt overtones of Samuel Beckett, this recital includes Bach’s Italian Concerto and Chromatic Fantasy (the Fugue is omitted in a gesture of derision), works he openly despised, seeing their ‘vocal’ embellishment and romantic freedom respectively as lax alternatives to glittering close-knit polyphony. Not surprisingly, both performances are weird and wonderful indeed, though given Gould’s genius even his wraith-like, disembodied view of the Italian Concerto’s “Aria” (its accompanying line as inexorable as a dripping tap) has a curious and hypnotic life of its own. He can take a heavy hand to the same composer’s C minor Fantasia, BWV906 and press home his points relentlessly in Scarlatti’s tempo di ballo (Kk430) but elsewhere his gleaming rapier cuts to the quick of a composer’s argument, to its very nerve-centre.
Heard in a competition by jurors of a safe, college-based disposition, such playing would be dismissed out of court as wilful and perverse. But there are higher goods than discretion and every bar of these extraordinary traversals breathes forth the spirit of adventure. The recordings of previously unissued material dating from 1959 to 1980 are admirably bold and clear, the photographs showing Gould pondering and be-gloved or exuberantly conducting what appears to be a bottle of Poland water, part and parcel of the overall effect. Michael Stegemann’s essay, too, is as always a bonus, unfolding the muddles and vicissitudes of Gould’s outwardly ordered career with all of his customary clarity.'