A little over two years ago, K and I invested in a digital piano with our tax return windfall. The Girl was taking an increasing interest in music, and guitar is not an ideal instrument for youthful, musical experimentation and discovery: you really have to coordinate both hands at once to get anything vaguely meaningful unless you’re in an open tuning with a slide. Having taken piano lessons for several years in my youth, I was also eager to rediscover the piano.

Since then, I’ve combed my old piano books for familiar and new. One of the pieces I’ve fallen in love with and begun working on is Mozart’s “Fantasia No. 3 in D minor”, K. 397. Naturally, I turned to YouTube and found three radically different interpretations.

You can tell a lot just by looking at the times of the video: Jorg Demus’s version clocks in at 4:12; Gould’s lasts an excruciating 8:22; Arrau’s, a reasonable 6:07. Just from looking at the times, you see that Demus is playing twice as fast as Gould, who in turn is taking a tempo thirty percent slower than what seems reasonable.

Jorg Demus plays it like he’s taken a whole bottle of speed. At this speed, the second part of the piece, which transposes into D major, sounds almost like a tape played at double-speed. This portion is marked allegretto, which Demus seems to think is synonymous with presto. It’s most painful at the 3:30 mark. In fact, as I listen, it sounds like it must be artificially accelerated.

Gould, on the other hand, plays it like he’s taken a bottle of valium. Slow, plodding, almost childishly mocking, with typical Gould liberties: erratic tempo, unnecessarily arpeggiated chords.

And of course, there’s that ever-annoying Gould humming in the background. I can put up with it on his second recording of Goldberg Variations, but perhaps that’s only out of habit.

Only Arrau plays it as it seems it should be played. The tempi aren’t exaggerated — allegretto sounds like Allegretto — and there’s enough of a lyrical touch to infuse an artist’s ever-important “interpretation” (often “mutilation”) without compromising the period and making it sound like a Romantic wannabe. Arrau has such a perfect touch that I’d have been partial to his interpretation from the start.

Yes, this is a filler post…