A voice ‘loyal to one great octave’
Petula Clark set to perform personal Bach-based hymn at Glenn Gould Prize event
It will come as no surprise to hear a little J.S. Bach on the program when the 2015 recipient of the Glenn Gould Prize is announced at Koerner Hall on Tuesday morning. No aspect of the late pianist’s genius continues to resonate more deeply than his Bach performance.
What will be a surprise is that the Bach arrives when Petula Clark sings “Reflections,” her own coming-of-age lyric adapted to a melody derived from Bach’s chorale cantata, “Wachet auf,” itself borrowing from a 16th-century hymn.
“It was my producer John Williams’ idea,” says Clark to explain how the two needed something unique to complete Lost in You, her highly regarded 2013 album, released nearly half a century after her bestknown hit single, “Downtown.”
“I thought the music was wonderful, but it had a strange feeling to it. I knew I was writing about my life as a child growing up in Wales becoming conscious of music. But it was as if Bach were breathing down my neck. Or maybe it was Glenn Gould.”
Clark, now 82, is on the high-profile prize jury chaired by rock producer Bob Ezrin. Others are Adrienne Clarkson, Michael Ondaatje, pipa virtuoso Wu Man, Sarah Polley, soprano Deborah Voigt, movie industry honcho Martin Katz and Princess Julie of Luxembourg, an arts patron. Jury member tenor Jay Hunter Morris is to perform as well.
The $50,000 prize is a lifetime achievement award given to someone who “has enriched the human condition through the arts.” Past winners include Robert Lepage, Leonard Cohen, Oscar Peterson and Yo-Yo Ma.
Some past winners and jury members — violinist Yehudi Menuhin most prominently — enjoyed long and fruitful working relationships with Gould. To others he was an enduring presence.
“I never met him,” says Ezrin. “He was older than me by 20 years, a huge classical star, while I why this little rock ’n’ roll kid,” producing Alice Cooper, KISS and Lou Reed, among others.
“But he carried on a relationship with Cornelia Foss” — the married American painter who moved to Toronto to be near Gould with her two children — “in a house that later became my first house,” Ezrin continues. “Then I bought my first piano, which was one Gould had looked at. I’d work in the studio he’d work in, and became friends with many of his friends. I feel I’ve been following him around the world.”
Ezrin is now in the early stages of producing a film about Gould with Foss and her children.
Yet few had a more intimate liaison than Gould and Clark, “although we never met, despite all the times I was in and out of Toronto,” she points out.
In 1967, Gould startled the classical community — his mission in life — with an essay called “The Search for Petula Clark,” in the fall 1967 issue of High Fidelity/Musical America magazine. On Dec. 11, 1967 he delivered a CBC Radio essay on the same topic, only now she was called “Pet” in the title. (The nonplussed CBC announcer for the program keeps calling her “Pet- ula.”)
The magazine piece is alternately overblown and brittle, but always bright, with too many intellectual tangents. The radio show, on CBC’s Ideas, is far more revealing, as I rediscovered listening to it again recently in the CBC archives.
Gould’s announced aim is to invoke Clark — “pop music’s most persuasive embodiment of the Gidget syndrome,” he sniffs haughtily — as his way of commenting on pop in general and the maladroit Beatles in particular. What it reveals mostly is how deeply Clark’s voice, “fiercely loyal to its one great octave,” got into his head and stayed there. Gould never knew why. He couldn’t stop it or explain it away, in the essay, as he books himself into a local hotel.
“I didn’t hear the radio program but I read it,” Clark told me while still in London recently where she’s preparing another album. “And at first I wondered what all of this was about. Is it some kind of joke? (The essay) is kind of tongue-in-cheek. But there is a kind of longing in it too. We’ve all been here, alone, in a hotel room.”
When Petula Clark is alone in her hotel room, she stretches out on the floor while listening to Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations. The Eleventh Glenn Gould prize winner is being announced Tuesday at 11 a.m. at Koerner Hall, 273 Bloor St. W. Admission is free. Peter Goddard is a freelance writer and former Star music critic. peter_g1@sympatico.ca
“But it was as if Bach were breathing down my neck. Or maybe it was Glenn Gould.” PETULA CLARK GLENN GOULD PRIZE JURY MEMBER