Ho hum  

After seeing various mentions of the Simone Dinnerstein, Tyler Cowen's recommendation finally pushed me over the edge, and I listened to them while running this morning. A few things about them impressed me, but I couldn't really get over how cavalier she was with the tempi throughout. Maybe I've spent too many years listening to Glenn Gould, but it just seems like when you're playing this kind of music you shouldn't be slowing down and speeding up in the middle of a variation -- at least not so perceptibly. I did like that she drew out certain lines (usually bass lines) a little more, so that I felt like I was hearing them for the first time. And I loved the couple of places where she quoted Gould's ornaments (from the 1981 recording, of course, because that's the one she's more indebted to). But overall I just don't get the comparison with Gould. The worst part was the way she played the final few variations for their individual personalities instead of using them to build on one another toward that glorious Quodlibet.

By the way, I love this bit about how to take Tyler's recommendations from a commenter there this morning:

Tyler is on record as saying he skims books and reads only their beginnings in most cases. He is also on record as being interested in deception (to wit, his recent experiment about the secret blog). Most of his lists of favorites could have come from a Top Ten list published by any existing critic. What I'm saying is, he probably knows as much about Gould and the Goldberg Variations as anyone else would learn by reading the New York Times. Also never forget that the name of this blog is Marginal Revolution. Tyler only needs to commit the tiniest fraction of time and effort to extract the majority of influence and intellectual power. He is leveraging our tendency to give people the benefit of the doubt, by saying superficial things and forcing us to assume there's an iceberg beneath the tip. He has shown time and again a very deep knowledge of economics, and on economic subjects I would trust him almost implicitly. But on cultural matters I think he's playing the odds and making you blink.