Triple Threat

In the year and a half since he made his debut on the U.S. concert stage, 23-year-old Toronto-born Pianist Glenn Gould has inspired more critical kudos than many a performer receives in a lifetime (TIME, Feb. 6). Nevertheless, he has long cherished an ambition to forgo performing for composing. At the Stratford (Ont.) music festival last week, he put his multiple talents on display. Within one two-hour program, he appeared as piano soloist, returned to hear the first concert performance of his String Quartet, followed that by conducting Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte.

Gould's moody, darkly romantic Quartet moved several critics to high praise; it also proved that Composer Gould is still several giant steps behind Pianist Gould in accomplishments. Glenn Gould was 3 1/2 when he first sat down to play. By 10 he was studying with the Toronto conservatory's Alberto Guerrero; at 14 he performed with the Toronto Symphony. Since then, his life has been rigidly circumscribed by the demands of his musical career. In his rare free hours (he practices and reads scores eight hours a day before a performance), Gould studies other composers (major influences: Schoenberg, Anton Bruckner, Richard Strauss), reads omnivorously (favorites: Kafka and Thomas Mann), dodges social activities. "If an artist wants to use his mind for creative work," he says, "cutting oneself off from society is a necessary thing."

Gould practices some broad eccentricities--he is likely to bundle up in overcoat and muffler in the hottest weather; he usually soaks his hands and arms in hot water before he begins to play. His fussiness about pianos is legendary--once he insisted that the keyboard had to be lowered one twenty-fifth of an inch. He sings off key while he is playing. "The piano is basically a percussive instrument, and the performer must imitate the vocal inflection," Gould explains.

Whatever Gould's eccentricities, they have not interfered with his swift rise to the top rank of contemporary performers. Now he is tempted to give up performing for composing; he wants ultimately to devote only two months or so a year to playing and the rest of the time to composing. "Before I'm 70," says young Glenn Gould, "I'd like to have made some good recordings and composed some chamber music, finished a couple of symphonies and an opera."

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