Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould - Tapa dura

"Well researched, well-written, intelligent and fair, Kevin Bazzana's Wondrous Strange will be seen as the definitive mainstream biography of Glenn Gould" Nicholas Spice, Publisher, London Review of Books; "Kevin Bazzana, a leading authority on the art of Glenn Gould, has now undertaken to give us the biography we have been waiting for - the life and times of a most unusual man, told with passion, intelligence, wit, and fair-mindedness." Tim Page (Pulitzer Prize winner), Washington Post"

In this absorbing and entertaining biography, Kevin Bazzana distils twenty years' research on Glenn Gould's celebrated life as a pianist, writer, broadcaster, and composer. Looking beyond the legend of the self-taught and emotionally damaged recluse who burst onto the international musical scene in the mid-1950s but was dead at fifty, he presents a balanced portrait of a complex figure who, while uniquely gifted and genuinely eccentric, was also the product of his upbringing and surroundings. Bazzana explores the lasting effects on Gould of his sheltered middle-class Toronto upbringing, his unusual musical education, his brief but colourful concert career and his relations with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Columbia Records and Steinway and Sons. Drawing on candid recollections by Gould's friends and colleagues as well as newly available private papers, he provides fresh insights into Gould's famous eccentricities, his sometimes bizarre stage manner, his highly selective repertoire, his control mania, his private and sexual life, his hypochondria, and his abrupt retirement from concert performance to communicate solely through recorded performance and print.