Although famous Canadian pianist Glenn Gould has been dead for 24 years, he performed a special concert of “Goldberg Variations” yesterday in the CBC’s Glenn Gould Studio.
The Globe and Mail reports that John Q. Walker, the president and C.E.O. of Zenph Studios, was behind the event, which he calls a “reperformance.”
“There’s a piano on stage, with no bench,” he explained to the Globe. “The keys are going, and the pedals are moving up and down – and some people may find that disconcerting. The audience will hear the entire ‘Goldberg Variations,’ which takes about 38 minutes.”
Gould first recorded Bach’s “The Goldberg Variations’ in 1955, which is the version that Walker has decided to showcase his musical reproduction computer program with.
“There are about 10 different musical attributes that we analyze,” continued Walker, “including pitch, moment of impact, strike velocity, duration, how the note ends, and the angle of the key when it’s depressed. We can do everything we want with the instrument through the computer.”
Walker has been playing movements of this piece all around North America to show off this new technology, however this was the first “performance” of the complete “Goldberg Variations.”
