A friend introduced me recently to Brahm’s piano work, Intermezzo No. 2 in A-major, Opus 118, and it just overwhelmed me—music is difficult to write about, of course, but this thing is just stunningly beautiful, full of all sorts of grace and delicacy and lightness that I’d never before associated with Brahms.

Now here’s the problem. I’ve downloaded a recording of the piece by Van Cliburn, but it seems—I don’t know. Ponderous, somehow. True enough, but lifeless. And I’ve downloaded a recording by Glenn Gould that makes Brahms sound (as I suppose you’d expect of Gould) almost like Bach, rendering the piece is a precise, contrapuntal way, giving as much weight to the base line as to the treble, and rendering the work into passages rather than presenting it as a whole—marvelous passages, you understand, but still. (Readers who’d like to hear these performances for themselves can download Cliburn and Gould from iTunes.)

So, Jay, I appeal to you, NR’s own Music Man. If Cliburn and Gould are out (and if you consider that premise mistaken, feel free to scold me) then whose recording should I look upon as definitive?