Gould Standard.(Sound recording review)

Opera fanatics have Maria Callas; everyone else has Glenn Gould. For listeners, the endless stream of reissues is justified by these artists' incandescent talents--and for EMI and Sony Classical, who, respectively, control most of their recorded legacies, it's been great business, too.

Sony may have finally topped itself by offering all of its Gould recordings, with the original jacket art, in one boxed set (available exclusively on Amazon.com). But another recent Gould reissue, "The Young Maverick," a six-disk set from CBC Records (a division of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), has a purity of intention that commands respect. These radio performances from the early nineteen-fifties, recorded mostly in Toronto, reveal the young virtuoso in all his glory--including a lyrical 1954 rendition of Bach's Goldberg Variations, the same piece that, a year later, launched his international career, thanks to a recording by Columbia Records, Sony's predecessor. The vintage sound of the broadcasts sometimes obscures, though never overwhelms, the quality of these performances. Gould's conception of Berg's Piano Sonata is so sumptuous that it ...