Glenn Gould, The Complete Original Jacket Collection, 80 cd set.

Both amazon and cduniverse have the individual disc back ordered at this time. I think the solution for those of us who received defective discs is to order the individual disc in the future.
Thanks for your post. Enjoy the music. I'm listening to the Beethoven Sonatas on Disc 2 as I write this.

 

The set arrived today, sent from Germany, (despite having been an Amazon US purchase), which came as a great relief, (no import duty/collection fees). Very nice set indeed, I'd need a magnifying glass to read the liner notes on the back covers though. The first CD i played was the now notorious #37 and, yes, it's the defective one, (IFPI 0772 in this case). I'll wait and see if Sony are going to correct this and, if not, I'll buy the single disc version....if that's OK
Now to work my way through the other 79

 

That's interesting. If I order something from Amazon.com, it's actually sent from Canada, so I never have to pay taxes or service charges, either. If I order the same item from Amazon.ca, I always have to pay the tax. Guess which site gets most of my business?

 

I cannot quite figure out one Amazon MarketPlace Participant which charges the standard $2.98 for shipping CD's via MediaMail and yet it says "Ships from Switzerland International shipping available" on its Amazon product listing. How can the outfit make any money as even the slow boat from China from Switzerland will cost a bit more than $2.98? Can some forum members who have experience with ordering from Europe shed some light on this?

 

Defective

I got my set on Friday, complete with defective number 37 disc. I was hoping the noises could be simply a nuisance, but they're quite loud. I wrote to Sony using a feedback link on their web site, asking for a replacement disc. I'm not sure my note will be routed to someone who can help. I'll give them a couple of days.

 

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Wow - it's here

Sounds fantastic so far - I've listened to disc #69 since I know the recordings very well and I'm happy to say that it improves upon the already wonderful original CBS CD I had (this new edition has slightly tamed the top end which was a little edgy on the earlier edition). The page-turning sounds made me look around to see who else was in the room before I remembered the sound was in the recording

Disc #37 is defective - and since it has a label unique to this set I would like a replacement from Sony (buying the seperate release would get you a disc that doesn't match - "not that there's anything wrong with that" ).

Still, for £50 I don't think I've ever bought a more impressive bargain.

Incidentally, I purchased the "Ratatouille" DVD at the same time since its not out in the UK yet and both that and the Gould set arrived sent from Germany?! It's the US DVD so I figure they sent both items to their depot in Germany first before forwarding them on to the UK. So, although the set is made in the EU I'd guess they are all being sent out from the US if you buy them from amazon.com.

 

Record globally, act locally.

That's how mine was shipped. The box indicates it was manufactured in the EU, but it was shipped from a USA address.

 

Mine arrived today and it is a wonderful set.

My # 37 is defective as indicated; I would have take a long time to discover this were it not for this forum! Please post if anyone finds a solution to this issue...

 

I think everyone has a different solution. Someone said there was a way to contact sony through their website, but I couldn't find it.
I returned exchanged the box with amazon once, and still the disc was defective as I expected.
I asked amazon for a suggestion and they offered me a 10% discount, which covered the cost of ordering the disc individuallly. Now I'm waiting for it to come off back order.
Good luck.

 

Defective disc

I found this link by visiting the Sony BMG Masterworks web site. No response yet. I would have preferred an address that concerns itself with defective items.

How will we know if the individual disc has been corrected yet?

 

I'll let you know when I get it, if the thread is still alive. I simply figured that one disc is a lot easier to ship back and forth than 80.
Can't assume, of course, but Sony must be getting all of these back and they know there's a problem. How long it takes to get it corrected depends on where in the production chain the errors were introduced. Hopefully not on the masters themselves.

 

Here's the blurb about defective discs at the old "Original Jacket Collection" site:

If you find a technical defect in one of our products and you bought the product in the United States, please call our quality control department at 800-255-7514 (New Jersey residents should call 856-722-8224). We make every effort to meet the highest standards, but we know that occasionally we make mistakes.

We know the first number is apparently out of action - can someone Stateside try the second number to check that's also out of commision?

 

Kept ringing

I tried it last night, and the late hour produced predictable results. But unlike the toll-free number, this one rang. I'm going to try it again on Monday.

 

New York Times

from nytimes.com:


November 24, 2007

The Continuing Cult of Glenn Gould, Deserved or Not
By BERNARD HOLLAND

When Glenn Gould died unexpectedly in 1982, a victim of a stroke at the unseemly age of 50, his red-hot reputation had calmed to a simmer. Gould, a sufferer from extreme stage fright but a winner in the stock market, had quit performing in public 18 years earlier, using the proceeds of his financial ventures to soften the burdens of early retirement. Much of his time later was spent with television projects in his native Toronto, not all of which had to do with the piano.

In death, Gould came to life. Music business operatives appeared suddenly and in hordes, claiming hitherto unnoticed intimacy with the great man and eager to share their experiences in articles, interviews and books. It was amazing how many had known Gould so well, spent so many hours exchanging deep thoughts during marathon middle-of-the-night phone calls to area code 416.

Maybe they also belonged to the tens of thousands who were present at the infamous premiere of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” or the opening night of “My Fair Lady.” The less privileged had to fall back on the newly spruced-up Gould recordings rushed into rerelease. Record companies that had not been paying much attention introduced great piles of discs into the marketplace, from big-ticket items of Bach and Beethoven down to the sweepings that Gould had left behind in the studio.

Brisk business was done over his body, and it hasn’t stopped yet. A cleaned-up version of his career-making 1955 recording of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations appeared this year and is now prominently on sale. Just recently I received a published photo album filled with childhood memorabilia. What’s next: the Glenn Gould coloring book?

It might sell. In a business hungry for the larger than life, this extraordinary pianist, space-cadet musicologist, fluent philosopher, prized eccentric and subtle self-promoter remains catnip of considerable potency.

No one before or since has had the dexterity to make such transparent child’s play of Bach’s severest contrapuntal puzzles. That he played these pieces at such blinding speeds was not necessarily because he should have; I think he just wanted us to know that he could. To his great credit, Gould’s playing never complicated the simple. It is easy to decorate naked melody, extraordinarily difficult to keep its simplicity intact.

To anyone who thinks that Gould was for a moment unaware of his public image, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you. In the “serious” music usually associated with him — Bach, Beethoven and (a reluctant pursuit) Mozart — Gould was happy to visit outrage on received wisdom. Yet he played Grieg and Brahms with docile acceptance of tradition. Assiduous in keeping his admirers off balance, he had probably decided that Gould playing Grieg was outrage enough.

Tales of his personal oddities were a thriving spinoff industry. There was Gould bundled up for blizzard conditions in tropical summer heat — indeed, he was apparently once arrested in Florida as a park bench vagrant. His inhibitions about touching or being touched in later years limited human contact, which was conducted largely by telephone. When he did attend functions, it was usually with his custom-made folding chair held under the arm like a baby blanket. The chair was adjustable and placed his body chest-high to the keyboard.

A West Coast friend tells of picking up Gould at an airport with his concert tailcoat rolled up in a carry-on bag like an army blanket. He cooed like Perry Como at recording sessions, and studio engineers usually left his vocalizing in.

The Gould legacy is of great value if we put it in the right place. He is the most interesting Bach player in memory, but when taken as a model of how Bach should sound, he is a catastrophe. People who blow up buildings get our attention, and sometimes their messages clean out our heads, but we don’t let them be architects.

Many years ago, interviewing Ivo Pogorelich, an eccentric bomb thrower of another sort, I asked about his favorite pianists. Himself, of course, and maybe Horowitz. What about Glenn Gould? Very interesting, but he has no education. Typical Pogorelich grandiosity, I thought at the time, but it is a response I often revisit. I prefer to think that Gould knew more about accumulated Baroque tradition than his playing let on. But with the courage and immense ego of all cultural Bolsheviks, he seemed to have decided that a 300-year-old trail of gathered wisdom would end with him. Outer space awaited.

With Angela Hewitt’s recent presentation of Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” at Zankel Hall still in the ears, I have been going back to the Gould recordings of these preludes and fugues on Sony Classical. At a number of moments, Bach is brilliantly served. Gould’s intelligent use of astonishing muscular control in the C sharp and E flat fugues of Book 1 gives separate personalities to two and three voices in simultaneous conversation, this on a modern piano constructed to make individual notes sound uniform rather than distinctive.

There are similar if occasional satisfactions. The rest is a series of assaults. They behave like satires, discreet lampoons of how everybody but Glenn Gould plays Bach. You hear a brilliant adolescent insulting his elders. The message of brashness is quietly put but no less potent.

Gould’s concepts can be horrifying — like ice water thrown in the face — but they are always fascinating. The famous C major Prelude of Book 1 makes a simple request for flowing arpeggios; Gould chops the phrases into half-legato, half-staccato. The C sharp Prelude and E minor Fugue from Book 1 are made ridiculously fast, and these are just two examples of show-off acceleration.

The E flat Prelude, again from Book 1, begs to flow over bar lines in long, melodic breaths; Gould turns to a machine-gun delivery of separated notes. Here, as in most of the preludes and fugues à la Gould, Bach’s meter shrinks to dainty little marches. Bar lines fence off phrases that want to sing but end up as maypole dances. This is not a matter of education; Gould played Brahms with as much far-reaching songfulness as any Romantic pianist. He just liked to be different.

Gould did not think much of the Mozart piano sonatas: another provocation, to be sure, but I agree that only a handful of Mozart’s piano sonatas enjoyed the composer’s full attention. Gould’s late Beethoven is filled with equally provoking weirdness. Oddly, he seems to have had little contact with Haydn, a fellow subversive. More oddly, he disliked Chopin, the godfather of all piano music. Had Chopin been less beloved, Gould might have liked him more.

Revolutionaries get our attention, and often for the better, but whom would you want running New York City, Mayor Bloomberg or Che Guevara? Clanking Pleyel harpsichord and all, Wanda Landowska is still my favorite Bach player. Ms. Hewitt is not bad either.

But keep the Gould recordings close by; they keep us stirred up. No matter how you do it, he said, I’ll do it differently. Gould blessed us all, even as he made us mad. He was the antagonized and antagonizing commentator, a shadow government for Bach style, his brilliant little bombshells handwritten in the margins of legitimate texts.

 

I have recordings by all the performers mentioned in this very interesting and insightful article on Glenn Gould, including the 80-CD boxset, which I am less than a third of the way through. The JS Bach English Suite by Ivo Pogorelich on DG is one of my favorites. The JS Bach English Suite and Italian Concerto by Angela Hewitt on DG is also excellent and the performance of the Italian Concerto is nothing short of brilliance. The Goldberg Variations by Wanda Landowska I have was performed on harpsichord and I am not sure if it is really better than performances by Gustav Leonhardt or Trevor Pinnock. But to me, Gould is still the ultimate interpreter of JS Bach keyboard works in the last 50 years and perhaps the past century.

 

i am simply loving this box. one question: how do i know if disc #37 is defective? i listened to it and didn't notice anything wrong. will it start skipping at a certain point or are there screeching noises throughout? thanks.
PS. i like the GG quote in the book about Schumann being one of the 'weakest figures' in music. i totally disagree!

 

Eddie - I used your post to find the problem area on #37 :

http://www.stevehoffman.tv/forums/showpost.php?p=3011631&postcount=80

Let us know if you get the noises on tracks 26, 28, 30 & 31 - if not, I'd like to know the matrix number

As for Schumann - in my opinion he's the greatest piano composer of them all!!

 

Anyone in the US tried the second number during the day yet?:

856-722-8224

 

ah yes, my post.
yes, screeches on disc no. 37 for me, too. i'll call the 856 number tomorrow.

 

It is indeed, and nothing more so than the following paragraph:

"The Gould legacy is of great value if we put it in the right place. He is the most interesting Bach player in memory, but when taken as a model of how Bach should sound, he is a catastrophe. People who blow up buildings get our attention, and sometimes their messages clean out our heads, but we don’t let them be architects."

I think much of what is wrong with classical music as it has been played in the last 40 years comes from efforts to imitate the inimitable. For years, our stages have been filled with would-be Toscaninis and Furtwangler fetishists and Horowitz wannabes, and the results have been largely unfortunate. Let me hasten to add that I don't tar the models with this brush--I admire the work of the Maestro and Furtwangler greatly (yes, the screams of the fan-clubbers notwithstanding, it is perfectly possible to enjoy both!) and, if with somewhat less enthusiasm, that of Horowitz as well.

Perhaps that's why the most vital body of musical performance during the period has been baroque literature--the old models were few and, for the most part, readily subject to challenge by a generation exploring new approaches, even while cloaking them in vestments of "old" authority as "authentic performance practice." While not really part of the HIP movement, Gould's Bach fits well into that landscape in a way that, say, his Mozart--a personal reaction to a much more robust inherited performing tradition--does not.

 

I just did and it was answered by an outfit called AnswerCom, an answering service business.

 

Are they addressing the problem and issuing you a new disc?

 

They said it was a wrong number...