Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations: The Complete Unreleased 1981 Studio Sessions

In 1955, Canadian pianist Glenn Gould surprised executives at Columbia Masterworks by choosing J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations for his debut recording. His performance was fast and fluid and sparkling and delicious, and it was an astonishingly big seller. In 1981, Gould came full circle and recorded the Goldbergs again. It was his last studio recording. That second attempt could not be more different from the first: relentlessly intellectual, percussive, insistent.

Outtakes from the 1955 sessions were released by Sony in 2018. Late last year, to honor what would have been Gould’s 90th birthday, Sony put out a package with a full-color coffee table book and 10 CDs of unreleased outtakes from the 1981 sessions—The Goldberg Variations: The Complete Unreleased 1981 Studio Sessions—with an 11th disc containing the 1981 album. This is not some nice Bach to play in the background during dinner; to reap any reward, the listener must work almost as hard as Gould and producer Sam Carter did. But for anyone with a deep love of Bach, Gould, the piano, or sound recording, there are many fascinating moments.

Some outtakes expose Gould’s perfectionism. Track 1 of Disc 2 is labeled “Rehearsal: Variation 11 – 2nd half – Preparation for next take – 2 false starts”; Gould plays eight bars exquisitely, then, when Carter asks him if he’s ready, replies, “I’m not [ready], this piece is murder.” He tries again, with just as much grace, and is still unhappy.

This collection can improve the listener’s ear. Listening with Gould, one starts to hear the tiny inconsistencies, contrapuntal motions a microsecond out of sync, the difference between a convincing cadential landing and a merely serviceable one.

The project is also a lesson in the importance of a well-qualified record producer. Carter, who won a Grammy for his work on this album, knows the score as intimately as Gould. In Variation 25, Carter points out the “sticky” second note in a triplet pattern. In the Aria da capo, he finds the bassline slightly heavier in bars 27 and 28. Examples like this are myriad, and Gould almost always agrees. He obviously trusts Carter, who is savvy enough to repeat one sentence several times each session: “That was very beautiful.”

The outtakes offer Bach in two- to four-bar bites, the Goldbergs reduced to their cellular structure. Gould and Carter craft a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle by making 10,000 pieces and discarding 90 percent. Only then can they assemble the puzzle.

The book includes two illuminating essays. The first is by Richard Einhorn, who stood in as producer for a few days while Carter was ill. Einhorn reports some of Gould’s recording habits. For example, Gould always did a take to capture the length of silence he wanted between two variations, even if the take wasn’t used. The engineer then knew what timing to recreate.

Gould’s mathematical approach to the Goldberg movements, new since 1955, affected the studio setup. In Einhorn’s words, “he developed a way to interconnect the variations through an elaborate proportional tempo plan; the upcoming variation’s tempo would be some ratio of the previous variation.” Gould had an engineer play back the end of the previous variation on a spare analog machine then mute it as Gould calculated his new tempo and started to play the next movement. Would Gould have minded letting his dirty takes hang out in public like this? Einhorn thinks not. “Unlike the many other artists who claimed they ‘never spliced,’ Glenn was very open, even proud, that he edited his recordings.”

The second essay is by Robert Russ, the producer of this collection, and Martin Kistner, the mix engineer. They describe the limestone mine in Pennsylvania where the Masterworks archives are housed and the types of material they drew from. The 1981 Goldbergs were recorded digitally—U-matic digital tapes and ¼” digital tapes with a 50.4kHz sampling rate and a bit depth of 16—and backed up with analog reels. Russ and Kistner used the analog sources almost exclusively for this transfer, capturing them digitally at 24/96.

The book is an audiophile candy store. Each CD label looks like the Ampex reel-to-reel tape box from a session, scrawled with a job number and date. There’s an array of recording ledgers, cards kept by Columbia to verify daily activity at its legendary 30th Street studios in Manhattan. Shots of the sound room and engineer’s desk are nostalgic; the place closed down not long after these sessions.

Musicians will get a thrill from the scans of variations from Gould’s editing copy of the Goldbergs. The printed music is nearly obliterated by comments and reminders scribbled violently in black and orange marker.

Each musical moment is surrounded by discussion between Gould and Carter, with occasional interjections by filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon, who was in the studio to shoot footage for a documentary. It’s fun to be a fly on the wall, but it’s easy to lose focus listening only to the voices and short bursts of music.

That’s why the book is essential: It offers a complete transcription of the dialog. You can page through and choose tracks to compare, then read along as you listen. A clean score—marked only with footnotes relating to the transcript—is included on every page to aid in hearing changes from take to take. (Incredibly, the promo copy I received of this high-quality book had pages 133–144 bound in upside-down.)

The way to benefit most from this collection is to pick and choose. Don’t try to listen all the way through. It’s like a vast museum, where you’re better off concentrating on a room each visit, or a few rooms. Or think of it as hundreds of samples of priceless liqueurs: taste small mouthfuls from a few bottles each time. It will always be there waiting for you when you’re in the mood to sample more

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