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There's a fascinating article in today's NY Times focusing on a new documentary about the great classical pianist, Glenn Gould:

"Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould," the fascinating new documentary by the Canadian filmmakers Peter Raymont and Michele Hozer, has won praise for providing insights into Gould's eccentric character. It shows the sad progression of a brilliant, garrulous musician with a fiercely original artistic vision as he becomes increasingly obsessive and isolated. Yet it also provides valuable insights into the inner workings of Gould's distinctive technique and unorthodox interpretive approach.

His biography is well known:

Though Gould was drawn to Baroque music and instinctively cultivated lucid musical textures, the film reveals the extent to which his principal teacher, the Chilean-born pianist Alberto Guerrero, imparted skills that maximized clarity.

An only child, Gould studied piano with his mother until, at 11, he began lessons with Guerrero at the Toronto Conservatory. By the time he turned 20 he had set out on his own.

He stopped performing publicly a mere 10 years later, but had already made his mark, not only with his unique interpretations of the music he played, but also with the technique taught to him by Guerrero:

Guerrero was an advocate of a technical discipline known as finger tapping. Apparently, the idea came to him while watching a young boy dancing in a Chinese circus. Guerrero spoke to the boy's trainer, who demonstrated his teaching routine: he moved the child's passive limbs into the desired positions, which the boy would then replicate, trying to maintain the feeling of relaxation.

Adapting the technique to the piano, Guerrero taught his students to hold one hand in a relaxed position on the keyboard, lightly touching the keys. With the other hand, the student would tap a fingertip enough to depress the desired key. The mechanical action of the key springing up would lift the finger back into place. The idea was to teach the fingers to play with a minimum of effort and no excess lift. This practice routine is demonstrated in the film by Gould's friend Ruth Watson Henderson, also a Guerrero student. Like Gould, Guerrero sat low to the ground, though not as low as Gould, whose preferred chair was just 13 inches high.

This technique would serve him well throughout his career, as the documentary footage shows:

There are as many approaches to piano technique as there are to Major League pitching, including some that emphasize lifting the fingers off the keys. Guerrero's regimen certainly worked for Gould, as is clear from the arresting segments in this documentary that show him close up, playing -- Bach's "Goldberg Variations," Bach's D minor Keyboard Concerto, Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto live on tour in the Soviet Union in 1957 -- always with pristine clarity and effortlessness, no matter how breathless the tempos.

But at the same time, there are some performances which would show the limitations of this approach. For instance:

It takes the whole body to play the Brahms concerto. You cannot dispatch this thick, chord-strewn work with fingers alone. During the development section of the first movement, as an outburst of rising octaves in the right hand races up the keyboard, chased by an outburst in the left hand, Gould's playing sounds anything but effortless. He gets through it, but not easily.

Tommasini, the author of the article, continues:

Gould's finger-oriented technique explains, in part, why he sat so low, though he was a gangly man. In this crouched posture, with his hands reaching up to the keyboard, his fingers do everything. Yet you cannot play the piano, at least the brawny works of Liszt and company, with just your fingers. Your arms, shoulders and back -- even your feet (to provide support during fortissimo chords) -- must get into act as well. There are techniques that teach pianists to drop loose arms, almost like dead weights, into thick chords, to let body mass fortify the sound.

That Gould's astonishing playing lacked this bodily dimension comes through in the film, in a segment about his performance of Brahms's D minor Concerto with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in 1962. Bernstein received criticism at the time for pre-performance remarks to the audience in which he issued a disclaimer.

It's here that we get a fascinating account of the dialogue between two of the great performers of classical music in the 20th Century:

"You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D minor Concerto," Bernstein began, "a performance distinctly different from any I've ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms's dynamic indications."

Bernstein then spoke about collaboration. Usually, a conductor and a soloist with interpretive discrepancies manage to "get together by persuasion or charm or even threats to achieve a unified performance," he said. But in this case the disagreements were so great, he explained, that he had to make clear he was deferring to Gould. He emphasized, though, that there "are moments in Mr. Gould's performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and conviction." (When you hear those comments today -- in the film or on the Sony live recording -- Bernstein comes across as tactful and sincere.)

As for the "controversy" surrounding Bernstein's remarks,

The film quotes Gould from a radio interview the next year saying he found Bernstein's speech that night full of good spirit and thought the whole controversy was amusing.

After Gould stopped performing in public, he spent the next 19 years making studio recordings with his compatriot, Lorne Tulk:

That Gould was beloved by a circle of intimates comes through touchingly in the film, especially in an interview with the audio engineer Lorne Tulk. After Gould, at 31, stopped giving public concerts and confined his work to the recording studio, he spent countless hours with Mr. Tulk, who carried out his painstaking editing demands. Gould was a pioneer in the creative (some would say manipulative) use of recording technology. Mr. Tulk was sometimes so involved in Gould's recording projects that he neglected his children, he says. Still, he was a devoted friend.

The article concludes with the most touching part of the story:

One day Gould told Mr. Tulk that they should be brothers, that they should actually go to some office in Toronto and make it legal. Mr. Tulk, as he recalls in the film, gently answered, "I would love to be your brother, Glenn," but "I have four brothers and a sister" who might want some say in the matter.

Gould thought this answer was very sweet, Mr. Tulk says. The subject never came up again.

Make sure you don't miss this fabulous documentary: "Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould."

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