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The Open Goldberg Variations

opengoldbergvariations.org

135 pointsvoodoochilo36 comments

This is an excellent recording. The voicing is very clear, the touch light, and the phrasing clear. My gripes are tiny, things like in variation 13, I'd love to hear a little more leading through the phrase with the pedal, but honestly, that would probably break something else in the phrasing. I'm a violinist, not a pianist, so I don't know the Goldberg inside and out the way I do the Sonatas and Partitas.

However, I'm confused why Gould came up at all, since his recordings of Bach are lousy. His tempos are often so bizarrely fast or slow that the music is lost (particularly in the two and three part inventions). His voicing ranges from pedestrian to wrong. As for his messing with tuning and his piano, he was largely an eccentric crank who pretended that no one else was doing that, had been doing that, and was doing a better job than him. Look at the Goldberg recordings on harpsichord by Wanda Landowska (my favorite) and Anthony Newman for much, much better renditions than Gould. As for greatest pianist of the 20th century, let's be honest: Rubinstein and Horowitz were both better pianists and incomparably better musicians.

the Landowska recording of Goldberg really is excellent

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rUgW4NbNEg

> I'm confused why Gould came up at all, since his recordings of Bach are lousy

You're not confused. You're just taking this opportunity to voice your (minority) opinion on Gould. I love his interpretation of Bach, and so do many others. His Goldberg Variations are among the most popular classical recordings. Of course his name is bound to come up.

As for "As for greatest pianist of the 20th century," why didn't you respond directly to the (single) person making that claim?

I'm confused why Gould came up at all

Perhaps Wikipedia can help clear your confusion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Gould

"Glenn Herbert Gould was a Canadian pianist who became one of the best-known and most celebrated classical pianists of the 20th century. He was particularly renowned as an interpreter of the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach. His playing was distinguished by remarkable technical proficiency and capacity to articulate the polyphonic texture of Bach’s music."

Gould is simply different. Great in his own way.

See also http://musopen.org/ ... initally funded by kickstarter, they use donations to produce pro recordings of classical music which are then released to the public for free.

is there a torrent available?

[update] pb says: http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/4961721/Musopen_Complete but no seeders

[update2] and the ID3 tags on the downloads are empty!

I donated to that through KickStarter. He recently emailed us to say that the editing had been completed ...

> Good news. Editing is complete, we are now mixing the music and adding finishing touches. I am spending all of my time listening through everything very carefully. We are close enough that I'm going to be submitting an order for t-shirts this week, and begin preparing everyone's gifts.

> I will send an update before everything is mailed, in the meantime I am figuring out a way to get the original ProTool files online so donors can download them and mix things themselves

> Thanks for your patience and for sticking through this with me, hopefully you will all be as pleased as I am with the final result.

It has taken about 18 months since he KickStart funding was successful. I think it was a lot more work than he anticipated.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/Musopen/record-and-relea...

Musopen was around before Kickstarter existed, but yes, they did do a round with Kickstarter.

I would recommend the various accounts of Glenn Gould's GV recordings, his Chickering and how it was voiced, as an example of the scope of the project. Voicing a grand piano by itself is a serious undertaking (read about inharmonicity and octave stretching). "Glenn Gould Reader" and "Romance on 3 legs" are good places to start.

re: microphone placement

http://glenngould.org/f_minor/msg04070.html

re: Simone Dinnerstein's GV

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/28/arts/music/28simo.html

Amen! For anyone unfamiliar with Glenn Gould, check out these two videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qB76jxBq_gQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVODxskoHFQ

He was perhaps the greatest piano player of the 20th century and had a strong hacker/genius/Aspergers aspect. My favorite quote about him comes from Composer Dimitry Tolstoy: "Gould was an alien on this Earth. People simply cannot play the piano like that!"

http://www.wqxr.org/#!/articles/wqxr-features/2011/jan/06/va...

Gould's home piano was a Chickering, but the GVs were played on Steinways in both the '55 and '81 recordings. The "condemned" CD318 he preferred was very like his Chickering, with a lot of lateral play. After it was fixed and brought to spec, it was just another piano.

I would love to have had the tech available to have him record his '81 remotely. The rhythmic continuity may have given it a less-than-traditional presentation, but I found the whole to make an engaging, coherent piece. But there was no getting around his voice by that point. Perhaps there could be a dynamically identical reperformance made some day (like the Zenph rendition of the '55 with a good deal more accuracy). Until then, I can put up with the sing-along, I guess. But I find I have trouble with traditional pacings now.

Both the DVD (in which the '81 is put together, largely in post) and the interview in the combined box set are well worth a listen.

Thanks for the info. I made an acquaintance of a concert pianist maybe 8 years ago, and started reading about Gould, different pianos. My friend has a mental catalog of all the pianos she's performed on, the hall acoustics, and the tuners (she told me there's a tuner around Santa Cruz, CA who's a magician).

Gould also purchased a Yamaha, i remember, I was surprised since it has a very different action, starting with 10mm key dip (vs. 3/8" on most European concert grands).

regarding singing: Keith Jarrett's older solo recordings feature humalongs, along with moans and groans too. It would be a pity to avoid those 2 artists because of that

Except that Jarrett did not, himself, want to get rid of the vocalizations. Gould did, but found that they had become such an intrinsic part of his learning of the piece that he was unable to play to his satisfaction without vocalizing. (Note that he's doing a sort of meta-riff much of the time rather than simply singing along with his playing. It bothered him that the non-Bachness of his singing has to be recorded along with what Bach wrote.)

It's not that I avoid Gould (or suggest anyone else does)—in fact I've got his entire Bach catalog and love it (Beethoven and Sibelius, not so much)—but one of the immense pleasures of listening to Bach in any form, and particularly in Gould's performances, is that one can listen to the whole of a piece and follow the voices individually at the same time. (Or, I guess, you can sort of Necker between the two if you can't quite hit the enlightenment listning.) That was where Gould blew the "reference" Landowska out of the water in '55 (she played a much more "chorded" performance). Listened to at low volumes, I can still do that with Gould's later recordings, but if the piece is played loudly enough to make the piano's voicing and dynamics distinctive, then the voice-over clouds the texture. I'd just love to hear it as Gould imagined it rather than as it was captured, not as a replacement necessarily, but as a companion.

>no getting around his voice

Are you referring to his vocal musings heard on the recording? To me, this is what makes these so very special - it is as if he is in the same room with me, humming away as if playing to himself with no-one listening. On that note, I'm listening to Kimiko's recording at the moment and she's playing with a distinct Gould influence yet it's almost too clean for me - a piece so exquisitely structured as the Variations can cope with a little less precision in terms of the rhythmic attenuation. I also think it's fair to say that Gould brought so much to this piece that we can't play it anymore without reference to him.

OP: you may find the Rachmaninov piano roll recordings interesting, my personal favourite the Prelude No.10: http://www.arkivmusic.com/classical/album.jsp?album_id=650

The '81 recording makes it difficult for me to enjoy other interpretations. The Aria is played more faithfully, but I find the pacing jarring to my Gould-81 ears.

I'm excited by the idea of a sizable library of works like this available to the public. However, I noticed some high-pitched squeaking in the 128kbs MP3 and the Soundcloud widget; initially, I thought it was an encoding artifact. After downloading the FLAC version, the chirps are even more pronounced, suggesting they were present at recording, possibly some sort of mechanical sound made from the piano. I find them really distracting, especially at the beginning of track 5, "Variatio 4." It sounds like it's up there in the 10khz-ish range. Anyone have any ideas on what it might be?

Probably your headphones, your DAC, or your imagination.

Why did you bother with this comment? Did you actually listen for the squeaking yourself? For the record, I did listen with different headphones and DACs before I posted here. As for whether I imagined it or not, frequency analysis on sections where I hear the squeaking shows an isolated peak at around 13.5khz. This peak is absent in sections and tracks where I don't hear the squeaking. I also applied an equalizer to the track, to amplify the squeaking. The chirps become clearly audible when this is done.

I can't hear it with my equipment, but it's definitely visible in the spectrum around 14kHz. http://seanpalmer.smugmug.com/photos/i-4Z4GXQm/0/O/i-4Z4GXQm... I tried isolating it. http://soundcloud.com/sep332/isolated-artifacts-from-kimiko

This was my attempt: http://soundcloud.com/antiterra/variatio4squeaks

Do you think there's a technique available to remove them without damaging the recording? Feel free to contact me: robert@opengoldbergvariations.org

From Robert at Open Goldberg Variations:

I believe that this was a mechanical problem with the pedal which we unfortunately didn't detect. It's worse on some speakers/headphones than others. Hopefully you'll still be able to enjoy

I expected something of low quality, but these are actually very good! Impressive piece of work. Was this funded through kickstarter?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimiko_Ishizaka

She is part of the Open Goldberg Variations, a Kickstarter funded, and Bösendorfer sponsored, team that recorded Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations and released the score and recordings into the public domain in May, 2012.

The sound of the Bösendorfer is beautiful and really special, maybe they should sponsor more like that. I'd love to listen to some 19th century stuff on that piano, in particular.

Check out Friedrich Gulda's 'Mozart Tapes' for more of it.

The Kickstarter campaign that funded the opengoldbergvariations: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/293573191/open-goldberg-...

The combination of an award-winning concert pianist + people who really understood the computational issues of music representation + the emphasis on high production value are a winning combo. My wife and I contributed a small amount to the Kickstarter project.

Would be neat if midi files were available too. (Not mechanical ones generated from the score, but rather recorded via performance on a good digital piano by a proficient pianist.)

@klipt they are available, as the recording was made on a Bösendorfer with CEUS technology: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/293573191/open-goldberg-... The CEUS MIDI recording will be made available in the near future. Follow @opengoldberg

since Gould is going to come up again and again, might I recommend checking out his recordings of the french and english suites, and the art of the fugue, all as good as the goldberg variations in my opinion!

To those interested in a MIDI file derived from the piano itself, there is this, from http://www.opengoldbergvariations.org/node/157: "CEUS is a system that allows suitably equipped pianos to faithfully record and reproduce real, live performances by playing the recording back on the piano exactly as played. Every detail, from the velocity of the key stroke to timing and pedaling is reproduced as in the original performance. The CEUS recording of the Goldberg Variations will also be released to the public domain." It might not be too much of a stretch to devolve the CEUS data into MIDI.

Besides the studio recording of the Goldberg Variations is the new score, "engraved" in Musescore: http://musescore.com/opengoldberg/goldberg-variations -- "source code", if you will, that can be used. I'd love to see work done on integrating the video display of the score with the actual recording, using the "page turning recognition" technology shown in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLYCWFboieM&feature=plcp

@rdhyee we'll demonstrate the score following made by SampleSumo with the MuseScore sheet music in 2 days in Munich at Classical:NEXT: http://www.classicalnext.com/program/showcases/showcases

"In a special performance that marries the music of Bach and cutting edge internet technology, internationally acclaimed pianist Kimiko Ishizaka will perform Bach’s Goldberg Variations at Classsical:NEXT. Thanks to an audio tracking technology developed by SampleSumo and a special new digital edition of the Goldberg Variations score, the audience will be able to follow along with the score as Ishizaka plays. The score, which was created using the open source notation software MuseScore, as well as Ishizaka's recent recording of the Variations, were crowdfunded by fans and released to the public domain as a part of the Open Goldberg Variations project."

where's the torrent?

jsb simply rocks

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