both pieces are relatively obscure, but i can just see people covering their ears when thierry plays the hétu variations. the bowen toccata is completely tonal, a fun piece, and is a great technical showpiece. my vote still stands for the bowen.
actually, now that i think about it, the hétu variations was one of the contemporary pieces that glenn gould played. perhaps if a great one such as him performed it, it may be more worth performing than i think. perhaps im just missing something in it.
Gould had a high opinion of the piece, writing:
"His Variations are an ebullient and stagey piece of work. Hetu's flair for the instrument is unmistakable. Everything works and sounds and lies rewardingly beneath the fingers. Yet the impressive thing about these Variations is that despite their unabashedly theatrical inclination, they are held together by a sure sense of the purely musical values inherent in their material...
The fact that Hetu does so, with verve and spontaneity, augurs an important career."
And there is an interesting anecdote about Hetu's response to Gould's recording, though it leaves one wanting more information:
"[Gould] did not bother to consult Hetu before recording his Variations in 1967. Hetu found out about the recording through a letter from Columbia a few weeks before it was released, and, though impressed by Gould's analytical grasp of the piece in the liner notes, he was shocked by the performance (he couldn't sleep for three days, he said); years later, however, he came to feel that Gould's interpretation of the Variations, despite its fundamental departures from the score, had its own integrity and offered a
viable alternative to the composer's vision of the piece."
(italics added)
An interesting point from the mouth of the composer himself. So often we are bullied into believing that this elusive thing called "composer's intentions" - a singular collection of consonants and vowels that makes me want to vomit every time I hear it - is a fixed, rigid thing. For some composers it undoubtedly was (Ravel called performers "slaves"). But composers time and time again have accepted interpretations differing in many ways from their written marks; they themselves change them and are thus recorded, or written about (see Liszt on Chopin); they improvise on their scores; they revise and offer multiple editions. This moralizing about "composer's intentions" - gag - is really just another way for a teacher to beat a student into submission, with the apparent force of history on the side of the teacher. Nothing could be more immoral and revolting. Tolstoy wrote the same about Orthodox priests in Russia pretending they alone held the key to salvation; it was wrong then, and it is wrong now!
Then again Hetu makes perhaps unconciously an interseting point - if Gould's interpretation is a "viable alternative," then surely one can study his record along with the score, and perform it as he did. In other words, it is not just Gould's own version, but one that would function in a general way with the piece.
Some things worth considering!
Walter Ramsey
Topic: National music competition (Canada)