Getting to know Glenn Gould

If you have $133 to spare, prepare to part with it now. That’s the price of Sony’s recently released 11-disc, nearly 11-hour Glenn Gould box, The Complete 1981 Goldberg Sessions.

If you don’t have $133, don’t fret (much). For $10.99, Sony has made available as MP3s a 45-minute ­appetite-­whetter for the pricier package—Recording Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations: Track-by-Track by Producer Richard Einhorn. And it’s plenty fascinating on its own.

Einhorn was not yet 30 when he was tapped in 1981 to pinch-produce (the main producer caught a cold) Gould’s second recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. The first, released in 1956, had made the Canadian pianist an overnight sensation. Gould’s revisitation of the piece, for which a film crew was hired to document the proceedings, was a big deal indeed. Einhorn was only on board for a few days, but he made the most of his opportunity.

Throughout Recording Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, Einhorn regales listeners with anecdote after anecdote of what it was like to work on the project. Gould’s talent and eccentricities have long been the stuff of ­legend, but hearing them described by someone who witnessed them firsthand provides vicarious thrills.

A good deal of unmediated Gould comes through too—Gould interacting with the control booth, Gould repeatedly trying to nail a nine or 10-second insert to Variation 8, Gould fretting over why the wooden chair on which he’d been sitting to play since he was a child should be creaking too audibly all of a sudden.

But the most unexpected section is Einhorn’s discussion of Gould’s humility, or, as Einhorn puts it, Gould’s “uncanny ability to make the people around him feel as intelligent as he was.” “His ability,” Einhorn says, “to make you rise up to his level rather than him coming down to your level was really quite remarkable.”

Reemphasizing the ’81 Goldbergs isn’t the only way that Sony is marking the 90th anniversary of Gould’s birth. The label has also combined the Gould collections compiled in 2008 and 2009 by the electronic-music star Ryuichi Sakamoto (A Journey to the Polar North and The Art of J.S. Bach respectively) into a $25 digital set called Ryuichi Sakamoto Collection. The Bach half feels like an afterthought, given how thoroughly Gould’s uncanny affinity for the Baroque era’s greatest composer has been documented elsewhere. The first half, however, proves that Gould could scale Renaissance, Classical, Romantic, and Modernist peaks as well.

Some of his interpretations still engender controversy. Kudos to Sakamoto—and Sony—for not abandoning the fray.