Despite his perpetual, wicked, Harpo-like silence, we always suspected that the Teller half of the comedy team Penn & Teller had considerably more to him than meets the ear. Turns out, he has.
To most, Teller is the silent half of the skeptical magic duo Penn & Teller. Offstage, he is as articulate as Penn Jillette is verbose, and is as charming a conversationalist as I've met. Also, he is an amateur keyboardist who finally bought a really nice harpsichord. [...] And Teller is quite the fan of Glenn Gould. "With Gould, there's the sense that either he has the best idea or the weirdest. His recordings of the partitas are my favorite, just for the way he unlocked the rhythmic power of that work." [...] If there is a North Star in Teller's Bach Heaven, it is Wanda Landowska. Her recording of the Well-Tempered Clavier (Book I cut for RCA Red Seal in 1951, Book II three years later) remains one of the benchmarks of baroque music, and the depth and vitality of her playing did much — worlds, even — to restore Bach's popularity as history's greatest composer. [...] "I absolutely pursued Landowska, of course, and — at the same time — it opened the Dangerous Door to Bach." [...] Teller has a funny habit of depersonalizing any mention of his own wealth or fame. He never refers to "I" or "me" in this situation, but rather "one", and when I ask him how he came to acquire his new harpsichord, he says as follows: "When one decides one has enough disposable income, one Googles 'Pleyel.'" [Landowska had built for her and played a Pleyel harpsichord exclusively.]We, of course, Googled nothing before commissioning our Dowd harpsichord way back in the '60s as there was no Google (or Internet) to Google in those Dark Ages, but Teller's and our route (the termination of which latter route we recounted here) to our respective harpsichord acquisitions was eerily similar. RTWT here.
It's The Music, Stupid!
Peggy
