As Goode as It Gets: Veteran Pianist’s Inspired Beethoven

It was discombobulating, for the first three-quarters of Richard Goode’s latest Dorothy Chandler Pavilion recital, to wonder where it was all going. Two handsomely performed Bach suites and a brace of Chopin pieces gave great pleasure, but the veteran American pianist seemed to be holding back.

Then, with Beethoven’s perhaps most misunderstood masterpiece, the A-flat Sonata, Opus 110, Goode brought what had seemed a haphazard agenda into focus.

The climax was achieved, a sense of order prevailed, and what we used to think of as a plateau between major peaks (those peaks being Opus 106, the “Hammerklavier” Sonata, and Opus 111, the 32nd and final work in the genre) took its rightful place as their equal in substance, depth and seriousness.

Opus 110 never blows its own horn, as it were, but states its case gently and inexorably.

The opening movement constitutes one of the composer’s most masterly through-composed songs; violence breaks out suddenly and harrowingly in the following Allegro. Thereafter, long and elegiac lyric passages alternate with powerful fugal settings. There is no dawdling or padding; every phrase seems preordained.

Goode, at 57, one of a handful of great, active pianists, argued effectively for the merits and irresistibility of this sometimes denigrated work, delivering a balanced and fluent performance of the highest polish.

He did much the same for the rest of his program, but less aggressively.

Bach’s French Suite No. 1 in D minor and the same composer’s B-flat Partita were highly detailed; he gave the dancing movements their due while caressing the songful ones lightly. Goode’s Chopin group, consisting of the E-major Nocturne, Opus 62, No. 2, six Mazurkas and the Barcarolle, was quietly understated, yet articulated astutely and with easy, compelling rubato. All the Mazurkas sang forth handsomely, but in particular the fourth one played, the E-major, Opus 6, No. 3, and the final one, in B-flat minor, Opus 24. No. 4.