Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould.

Mitzel, John

Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould

by Kevin Bazzana

Oxford University Press. 528 pages, $35. (illustrated)

When Mikhail Baryshnikov defected to Toronto while on a 1974 tour he said he knew three things about Canada: it had great hockey teams, lots of wheat fields, and Glenn Gould. Drawing on twenty years of research, including unrestricted access to Gould's private papers and interviews with friends and colleagues, many of them never interviewed before. Kevin Bazzana sheds new light on such topics as Gould's family history, his secretive sexual life, and the mysterious problems that afflicted his hands in his later years. Gould was well known for both his eccentric musical interpretations and his garish onstage performances. He would show up in a plain business suit, often baggy and unpressed, wearing mismatched socks and united shoes. There was his crouching over the keyboard, swaying forward and back, sweating copiously, his hair tossing back and forth. Sometimes he'd hum or sing along as he played. Seeing Gould in concert was considered a top ticket. He came from a religious, upper-middle-class background. His mother was a major influence, as was the one and only piano teacher he ever had. In 1964, Gould decided to perform only for recording sessions, radio, television, and film, a daring move for his career. Gould was always interested in new technologies, and helped to develop a new technique in radio documentary that he called "contrapuntal radio," in which the voices of several speakers would be blended through careful editing.