What made Glenn Gould a brilliant musician was his openness to high differentiation in music, which created the ecstatic intensity of his playing.

Glenn Gould died in October 1982. Twenty years on, he remains a spectre to aspirant pianists: revered by most, even the few who dislike his playing concede that Gould's interpretations are always fascinating and instructive. It is fortunate that he bequeathed such a large recording output, a result of his renunciation of the concert hall in 1964 and his subsequent devotion to the recording studio. "At live concerts," he said, "I feel demeaned, like a vaudevillian." He loathed the showpiece element of the concert hall: its artificiality, time constraints and the elevation of the individual above his craft -- a Romantic legacy as uninteresting to Gould as music that was not contrapuntal.

His performances displayed both remarkable virtuosity and peculiar adornment--"humming, gesticulating, untoward grimacing and conducting as he played," writes Said, a Columbia University professor and author of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Gould eschewed the romantic repertory of Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff that propelled contemporaries such as Van Cliburn and Vladimir Ashkenazy to superstardom, and then famously deserted the public stage in 1964 to devote himself to a cloistered recording career restricted almost entirely to the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. Since his death (from a stroke), Gould has been the subject of a host of articles and books, as well as a 1993 documentary, Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould.

Gould He preferred the stricter Bach-playing of Rosalyn Tureck to the freer approach of Wanda Landowska and Casals. He disliked the "tyrant" conductors such as Toscanini, Georg Szell and Fritz Reiner but got on well with Herbert von Karajan, with whom he shared an obsession with the technical aspects of recording. He thought Hindemith's Das Marienleben was the greatest song-cycle ever written, an eccentric opinion if ever there was one.

A child prodigy as a pianist, Gould soon became famous as much for his eccentricities as for his artistry. He sat unusually low at the piano in a chair made for him by his father which he continued to use even when it was falling to bits (its squeaks can be heard on some of his recordings). His face was almost on top of the keyboard, his knees were higher than his bottom and he appeared to be hugging the instrument. He often wore a cloth cap and a thick coat because he was terrified of catching cold, and he was notorious for cancelling recitals for a variety of trivial reasons.

There can be no doubt though, as recordings prove, that he was a great pianist in spite of the idiosyncrasy of his interpretations. If he played a work in a conventional way it was, Bazzana suggests, because he happened to agree with the convention after having considered other options. He had immense success in Berlin and in Moscow, where he was the first pianist from North America to appear in the post-Stalin era, but he was too "way out" for London.