Cast
Glenn Gould — Pianist
Program notes
The great director, violinist, and writer Bruno Monsaingeon—whose incredible body of work you can discover on medici.tv—brings us a captivating three-part series with the legendary pianist Glenn Gould. Over 15 years after retiring from the concert stage, Gould returns to the repertoire for which he is still so widely known and celebrated today: the keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Fascinating discussions between the pianist and the documentarian are punctuated by performances given by Gould between 1979 and 1981.
"Bach was forever writing fugues," Gould wrote in The Last Puritan. "No pursuit was better fitted to his temperament, and there is none by which the development of his art can be so precisely evaluated." In this second of three volumes, the pianist explains the importance of The Art of Fugue in the development of contrapuntal writing and demonstrates the undeniable power of counterpoint in another one of Bach's most beloved masterworks: The Well-Tempered Clavier, with celebrated fugues in every key signature, which Bach worked to perfect until the end of his life.