SEAN PERRIN

While reading Walter Isaacson’s inspiring biography of Steve Jobs, I was surprised to find some interesting insight form the Apple co-founder on Glenn Gould’s contrasting recordings of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations.”

Here are Jobs’s thoughts on the works:

Bach, [Steve Jobs] declared, was his favorite classical composer. He was particularly fond of listening to the contrasts between the two versions of the “Goldberg Variations” that Glenn Gould recorded, the first in 1955 as a twenty-two-year-old little-known pianist and the second in 1981, a year before he died. “They’re like night and day,” Jobs said after playing them sequentially one afternoon. “The first is an exuberant, young, brilliant piece, played so fast it’s a revelation. The later one is so much more sparce and stark. You sense a very deep soul who’s been through a lot in life. It’s deeper and wiser.” Jobs was on his third medical leave that afternoon when he played both versions, and I asked which he liked better. “Gould liked the later version much better,” he said. “I used to like the earlier, exuberant one. But now I can see where he was coming from.”

(Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, Pg. 413-14).

The following performance of the piece was recorded live in studio for a CBC broadcast in 1981, just months before Gould’s death. Gould had quit his performance career almost twenty years earlier, but he had a fascination with modern technology and its potential to reinvent music as an art form. I have a feeling that Glenn and Steve, both geniuses in their respective fields with a distinct love for technology, would have gotten along well…

Sean.