The thin thread that ties this Glenn Gould compilation sort of together is the pianist’s involvement with the cinema. Gould scored the 1972 film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s seminal novel Slaughterhouse Five via “needle-drops” culled from his CBS Bach catalog. While the film soundtrack used a specially recorded performance of the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto’s “Presto” movement by Gould and members of the New York Philharmonic, the Casals/Marlboro version was substituted on the original LP, as well as here. Gould scored Robin Philips’ 1983 film The Wars in a similar fashion with the Brahms and Strauss selections heard here. It would have been nice to hear the original music Gould composed for that film, too: a passage for cellos, a touching sequence with boy choir, and some harmonica music. Instead, we get Bach, Sibelius, and Scriabin snippets highlighted in the part-fiction-part-documentary Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. Divorced from their cinematic context, we get no sense from this disc about Gould’s skill for matching his recorded performances to onscreen images. What could have been a fascinating video release is instead an audio-only dud, and my performance rating reflects this.
