Glenn Gould: I detest audiences, not in their individual components, but en masse I detest audiences. I think they’re a force of evil, if I may once again revert to moral judgment. I cannot understand, really, anyone who does respond to them. I know such people exist. I know Arthur Rubenstein to name, but one example does respond in this way to an audience… I admit it as a historical curiosity that this was one way in which performers divined some form of inspiration which made them go and do, and that’s all to the good, I suppose, as long as he can go and do. I have to admit that that’s fine, but I find it a very chilling fact [that] it seems to me [to be a] rule of mob law.
Alex Trebek: However, many people seem to like the ‘rule of mob law’. There’s been a proliferation of symphony orchestras in the new world and in the old — records notwithstanding — but for Glen Gould the concert circuit has no charms whatsoever.
Glenn Gould: I really thank God that I’m able to sit in a studio with enormous concentration and enjoyment, doing things many times if necessary — which isn’t always — but doing things many times, and taking what is more important — a view of the work that I’m recording — which lets me in on the composing secrets of the work, really. There have been many occasions when I’ve recorded something, and have come into this studio at 10:00 on a Monday morning, and really been in sixteen — not just two different minds but sixteen — different minds as to how it should go. This sense of option is really quite a marvelous luxury. It’s a luxury that you cannot permit yourself in the concert hall; you simply cannot. You would be dead if you walked on stage not being quite certain. But, in fact, what happens is that by 1:00 in the afternoon, having given it 3 hours of work, I may not have come to any definitive conclusions, but I will finally have selected one of these options, and made it my priority, and out of this created a viable performance. The work has then only begun, in fact, because I spend a great many hours sitting in playback booth listening and listening and listening until somehow the priorities assert themselves absolutely, and I become convinced. If I don’t become convinced, we simply schedule another session, and come back, and do it all over again. This has nothing whatever to do with with ‘finger falls’; it has nothing whatever to do with questions of manual dexterity. What I’m talking about here is a sense of the line of the work: the sense of its architectural projection. I think that a whole new role of the interpreter has been opened by recording in this way.
[Insert] Zubin Mehta: I think he’s out of his mind. I couldn’t perform if there was not three people sitting out there. I couldn’t do that. I think every performer needs this stimulus. This is why I’m not very comfortable in recording studios which Mr. Gould is. He loses all his inhibition in front of the camera, or the microphone. Most of us are not like that. Not only do we need the stimulus, but we need somebody to receive what we are doing, you know. It can be somebody that we don’t know. There has to be somebody who is receiving from us. This is very important, I think, to anybody that steps foot on the stage to have this contact and to set foot on the stage in a recording studio without the contact to give the utmost. This is for me at least very difficult.