Notes/Tones on Two Pianists

Editor’s note: Glenn Gould, Canada’s most celebrated musical son, and Dominic Amoruso, Joe Fiorito’s fictional creation in The Song Beneath the Ice, are both supreme pianists and “personalities” of the first order. What follows is not so much a narrative review as a game or puzzle in pursuit of leitmotifs that relate this biography and this novel in the mind of the common reader. It is written by another of this country’s supreme pianists, a man who is also a playful poet and whose favourite breakfast (like Gould’s) is scrambled eggs.

Glenn Gould was an ecstatic contrapuntist. His Bach is popular, immensely, internationally. His two sets of Goldberg Variations rival Handel’s Messiah for the world’s ear; both confer blessing. But Messiah is a composition. The Goldbergs are a performance. Dominic Amoruso, in The Song Beneath the Ice, is a Toronto pianist on the lam...