Treasures for the taking

“You mean the voice?” he asks. (Gould famously could not prevent himself from singing along when he played. And his voice, though muffled, comes through now and then.)

He tries again. But now he’s clearly rattled, as you can hear in some edgy notes and general uptightness. “No, now you’ve got me a mental block, same thing happened,” he says.

Take 3, played at Gould’s desired racing tempo but now with brio and command, would be the approved one of the first variation. Still, Gould plays more takes — 13 in all! — between which he often expresses exasperation with himself.

As I kept listening to take after take, my mind froze. After a while, I stopped being able to figure out why Gould and Scott finally went with certain versions and not others. The entire recording could have been edited much differently and still created a sensation. And, in fact, Gould grew to feel that his 1955 Goldberg recording was, he said in an interview near the end of his life, “just too fast for comfort.” In 1981, he had recorded the work again, with a still bracing but generally mellower approach. Overall, this is the version I prefer; it was released the following year, days before he died of a stroke, at 50.

Over his career, Gould increasingly embraced recording’s potential to foster experimentation. He gave up playing concerts in 1964 and retreated to the studio, where he got involved with the detailed engineering of his releases, sometimes juxtaposing different portions of a piece played with various styles and approaches into a curious final synthesis. In a 1966 article, The Prospects of Recording, he fantasized about a future when listeners would be granted tape-edit options and could patch together their preferred versions of, say, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, from recordings by different conductors.

A happy compromise has emerged over the past couple of decades, as sophisticated digital technology has made live recordings, which are cheaper to produce, almost preferable to studio ones. Engineers can record an orchestra in a series of performances of, say, an epic Mahler symphony, and then select one version, essentially, for release. But through digital editing, they can fix any problems, down to replacing a single wrong note with a correct one from another performance. The best results combine “ephemeral” immediacy with good sound and perfect (or perfect enough) execution.

For me, the most poignant parts of the Goldberg sessions come when he stops for a moment to practise a passage — sometimes slowly, sometimes with just one hand. Here, for an instant, he seems like all dedicated pianists, trying hard to bring clarity, a particular touch, lyrical shape or rhythmic bite, to a phrase. You get a fleeting, revelatory glimpse into Gould’s feeling his way into this music.