Day 41 (6.viii.08)

I found him. At last. Yes, the continuation of what has turned out to be a rather music-heavy week for me was my second trip to Mount Pleasant Cemetery to locate the final resting-place of Glenn Gould. I’ve been harbouring deep dissatisfaction at not having found him the first time for a while, so I decided to use today, after I’d filled my mind with vacuous hypothesising about global justice from my set reading, to remedy that. I Googled the relevant information, and found (typically) that he was in the one part of the cemetery I hadn’t explored last time, plot 38, tomb no.1050. My route there was identical to the one last month – Avenue Road, West St Clair Street, Mount Pleasant Road – but this time around, whether through the added sense of purpose, my deliberate attempts to walk only on the shaded sides of the route to avoid the punishing sun, or the fact that I’ve now got at least three or four similarly massive walks under my belt, the distance seemed puny in comparison to how I remembered it (for instance, I nearly missed West St Clair because it appeared before I had been expecting it).

Once there, I headed directly to the plot and soon found the Gould family gravestone, with a separate plaque for Glenn. It was absolutely scorching by this point, so I decided against taking a more scenic route to the section – I’d seen all there was to see in the rest of the cemetery last time. As I paid my respects, I was very pleased to see that, underneath the name, the engravers had added the first three bars of the Aria from the Goldberg Variations, showing quite how inextricably linked Gould’s name will always be with the works of J.S.Bach. Unfortunately, the flowers on the plaque had withered away – if I’d known where to get them, I would have brought some fresh ones of my own. I emerged on the Bayview end of the cemetery again, but decided to be inventive with my way back, and found another residential district in the Rosedale area (I believe), even more upmarket than the one I’d wandered through last time. I was conscious that the risk of getting lost was pretty high, given that my map didn’t actually show that particular part of Toronto, but I used an alternation of left- and right-turns to take me south and west respectively, paying special attention to the route that the sparse traffic was taking and amending direction accordingly. I eventually found my way back to Mount Pleasant Road, which eventually led me to the junction with Jarvis and, unexpectedly, Charles (East) Streets. Thence, of course, the way back was merely a straight line (I use ’straight’ deliberately, given that I had to cross Church Street again), with only a deviation (there, I said it) into Rabba’s for more juice- and iced-tea-purchases.

When I got back, I had some grapes and houmous (not together, obviously), and found myself embroiled in a Facebook Situation. Basically there’s a random guy called John Reynolds, whose profile makes him out to be 24 and gay, who appears to have added most of my nearer acquaintances as friends despite none of us actually having the foggiest idea who he is. I rejected his initial request, which was followed up within three hours by a second one – this naturally triggered every single suspicion-alarm in my immune system, and, though adding him, I constructed a perimeter of inaccessibility around pretty much all of my profile information, just in case. Unfortunately, doing so meant that I came up as a ‘mutual friend’ on everyone else’s friend requests from him, so they added him assuming this made him all good and kosher, and almost all promptly messaged me with variants of the general question “who the hell is this guy?”. My response was identical to everyone: I don’t know, I’ve made sure he can’t find out anything about me beyond what everyone already knows, do the same or you might regret it later… Ah well, the dangers of being trustworthy…

The various messages led me to an extended exchange with Will S, with whom I effectively ended up discussing my concert plans for the next year or two – the Goldberg as I’ve said before, Pictures at an Exhibition, the Italian Concerto, and, now I’ve listened to it on Naxos Music Library, Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata no.8. Plus of course the remaining Brahms, Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt I’ve got on the back burner if there’s any gaps that need plugging. I was going to do some Bartok, but it seems I’ve dropped off the end of the difficulty scale where his piano works are concerned; not even the hardest extremes of Mikrokosmos are anything close to showy enough for my current average recital programme, plus they’re not long or serious enough. It’s a pity, because Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste and Concerto for Orchestra are two of my favourite pieces ever – unfortunately, there’s nothing comparable in the piano repertoire apart from the Romanian Dances, but everyone and their dog has heard those gazillions of times already. As an encore, maybe, but not as a main project. To say that Will was supportive of my (highly ambitious) plans is probably an understatement – a mild paraphrase would be to say that his attendance is already guaranteed, and that a recording is already in demand…

~ by Marius Ostrowski on August 6, 2008.