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Glenn Gould Hereafter.

Article Excerpt
Glenn Gould Hereafter. DVD. A Film by Bruno Monsaingeon. [New York]: Ideale Audience International, 2006. DVD9DM20. $24.99.

When Glenn Gould died in 1982 at the age of fifty, he clearly had reached a new level of mastery in his career. His pianism--always brilliant but sometimes marred by perverse musical decisions--demonstrated a virtuosic clarity and interpretive richness that he had not achieved previously. And he was planning to turn much of his attention to conducting. A painfully slow, mysterious reading of Wagner's Siegfried Idyll in its original instrumentation is one of the few recorded documents he left in this area (Sony SK 46279, 1990, CD). Given Gould's considerable talents, imagination, and pioneering approach to various electronic media as a conduit for novel forms of artistic expression, I can think of few twentieth-century musicians whose untimely death deprived humanity of so much.

Perhaps for this reason, Gould maintains a powerful presence with music-lovers today: his records continue to sell, of course; more important, perhaps, many available film or video documentaries chronicle his life and work. In his own lifetime, Gould was photographed or filmed frequently, and so there is...

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