COMPOSERS: Glenn Gould
LABELS: Ideale Audience International DVD
ALBUM TITLE: Glenn Gould Hereafter: A Film by Bruno Monsaingeon
WORKS: find works
PERFORMER: Glenn Gould, Yehudi Menuhin etc
CATALOGUE NO: 9DM20
PRESENTATION: ****
This is the second film which Bruno
Monsaingeon has made about
Glenn Gould (he has also written
four books in French about him).
It aims not only to show us more
about him but also more about
the impact he has had on various
people, to the extent where they
genuinely feel he has changed their
lives. Monsaingeon has unearthed
a great deal of footage of the young
Gould playing the piano and talking
about music generally. Usually
Gould is phenomenally articulate
and intelligent, though his Achilles’
heel is his tiresome sense of humour.
And when he argues with Yehudi
Menuhin about the virtues of ‘live’
performance (which Gould hated)
versus recordings (which he loved),
I think Menuhin clearly gets the
better of it. They then play some
of Schoenberg’s Violin and Piano
Fantasy wonderfully. There are
many musical excerpts, though it is
annoying that you have to look in the
accompanying booklet to find out
what they are.
One of the film’s main object was
to show how absurd it is to think that
Gould was hardly interested in any
composer other than Bach. Though
it is absurd, one sees from the film
itself why that view is still sometimes
held. Michael Tanner
