GLENN GOULD AT WORK <i> by Andrew Kazdin (E.P. Dutton: $18.95; 218 pp.) </i>

Pianist Glenn Gould (1932-1982) was a controversial performer throughout his three-decade recording career. He made his first recording (his famous Bach “Goldberg Variations”) in 1956, and in 1964, gave up giving concerts forever. Much has been made of the Gould’s personal eccentricities: he used a low chair that put his eyes almost at the level of the keyboard; he obsessively avoided physical contact with people and once sued the Steinway company when an enthusiastic sales representative shook his hand too vigorously. The list of his peculiarities goes on at length.

In “Glenn Gould at Work,” Andrew Kazdin, Gould’s producer at Columbia Records for 15 years, concentrates almost exclusively on his memories of working with the pianist in the recording studio. “I have always found it interesting that over the years so much has been written about Gould’s working methods, but, strangely enough, the authors of these revelations had never been in attendance when Gould recorded and therefore could not have the slightest idea what they were writing about,” he notes. It is hard to imagine that 170 pages of largely technical discussions could be gripping, but Kazdin for the most part manages it, alternating between musical and electronic problems which the small group around Gould faced, and elucidating the problematic musician’s character through these stories.

There are fascinating descriptions of the extraneous sounds a piano can make, and what adjustments the studio setup and recording process can achieve. Gould’s irrepressible habit of humming as he played can easily be perceived in the recordings, but readers learn from Kazdin that an equally infuriating habit (to a producer) was Gould’s propensity to launch a verbal critique of a performance before the last notes had died to complete silence. (Kazdin managed to outwit the pianist in many cases: He asked him to indicate the interval he wanted between movements by pausing and then beginning a “dummy” take of the next movement.)

Kazdin occasionally turns petulant and self-justifying--no relationship with the madly egomaniacal Gould seems to have been easy--but these digressions are brief and forgivable in light of the revealing portrait that emerges. Reviewers often suspected--some even assumed--that Gould insisted on recording intentionally bizarre interpretations of well known pieces of music. Kazdin maintains that, on the contrary, Gould stood by the vast majority of his idiosyncratic performances (a complete discography ends the book). In only one case is Kazdin persuaded that the pianist distorted a piece out of perversity: When he had played the first movement of the Mozart Sonata in A, K. 331, he approved the excruciatingly slow performance for recording purposes with the statement: “There! That’ll bug the critics!”