"It is as a Bach player that he will live and his recordings constitute his permanent legacy. Sometimes, as in the Partitas, he forced professionals, music lovers and critics to reconsider the music, throwing overboard all preconceived notions. It was not only that he had wonderful fingers and an ability to clarify the linear elements of the music. Other pianists — admittedly, not many — could do that too. But none had his particular kind of firmly centered sonority; a sonority that Piero Rattalino, the Italian specialist on pianists, compares to the sound evoked by the great colorists — Horowitz, Richter and Michelangeli. Above all, Gould's Bach interpretations made the music sound different — different in tempo, in phrase, in dynamics, in conception. Elements nobody previously had paid much attention to suddenly sprang into high relief. But there was nothing eccentric or mannered about the performances. The music was passing through a mind that took nothing for granted. It was an original mind that worked on a different set of premises and principles from other pianists. One could not describe it as traditional Bach playing, or romantic Bach playing, or neoclassic Bach playing, or modern Bach playing, or musicological Bach playing. Whatever it was, it breathed a life and spirit unique in the history of Bach performance."