A Texas college professor was convicted of criminal possession of items once owned by Canadian icon Glenn Gould, reports the Associated Press.
The New York City jury found Barbara Moore, 62, of Austin, Texas, guilty of two misdemeanour counts of criminal possession of stolen property after a three-day trial in Manhattan’s state Supreme Court.
The items were stolen from the Canadian Library and Archives in Ottawa in the late 1980s.
However, Moore was found not guilty of third-degree criminal possession of stolen property, fourth-degree grand larceny ad third-degree attempted grand larceny. Moore’s lawyer, Shane Michael Brooks, called this “a huge victory.”
Moore could face up to a year in jail is Brooks does not get the probation he is asking for.
Gould, a world-famous pianist, died in 1982 at the age of 50.
Moore attracted attention after selling certain Gould items to a New York dealer in December 2004.
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.”
