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the Great Richard Goode at Spivey Hall
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Pianist Richard Goode. Sunday at Spivey Hall in Morrow. www.spiveyhall.org.
Like an iPod on shuffle mode, some musicians skip from one historical era or artistic fashion to another — and play everything with a democratic leveling of the repertoire and an equally “authentic” spirit. In classical music, the names are famous: Placido Domingo is a singer who does it; Yo-Yo Ma is a cellist; Simon Rattle a conductor.
Then there’s American pianist Richard Goode, who nowadays seems positively eccentric for sticking to his core aesthetic choices.
A distinguished name on the international concert circuit and a regular visitor to Atlanta, Goode played an exacting, impassioned recital Sunday afternoon at Spivey Hall. And though his repertoire spanned two centuries and across what could have been a range of styles, he held his own approach throughout. You can’t help but love an artist who’s got a story and sticks with it.
He opened with Bach’s G Major Partita No. 5, crisply dispatched despite heavy pedaling. Goode’s goal seemed clear: maintain a singing line at all times, even as the weight of tone and his approach to ornaments sounded more classically elegant than Baroque. There are countless ways to play Bach, of course; for Goode it was Bach filtered through Mozart to get to Brahms.
Not by accident, that was also the recital’s trajectory. After the Bach partita he slipped into Mozart’s seductive A minor Rondo (K. 511), a 10-minute theme-and-variations where Goode’s understated brilliance and enriching virtuosity — never a glib moment — made this quirky music a small masterpiece.
With the set of Brahms’ seven Fantasies, Op. 116, he finally revealed the core of his being, the hub of his artistic sensibility that informs everything else he plays.
Except for the longish mane of silvery hair, Goode doesn’t look the part of a temperamental artiste. Indeed, in a long “New Yorker” profile in 1992 — reprinted in David Blum’s compulsively readable book “Quintet” — Goode’s mild and finicky off-stage temperament was compared with a librarian’s.
But in the Fantasies’ volatile movements — called capriccios — he was excitable yet controlled, a quiet man with a blazing inferno inside. His sense of balance, proportion and fury was unfiltered, almost frightening. Totally lost within the music, he hummed along, his face flushed, his eyes wild.
For the set’s introspective movements, like the E Major Intermezzo, he found gentle poetry, and let its long graceful tail reach its own twilight. Regular concert goers wait months, maybe years, between performances of this calibre, of this in-the-moment power and authority and vulnerability. (Spivey Hall, the region’s most perfect venue, gets credit for allowing this sort musical intimacy to be possible.)
Unlike the other composers on his program, in Brahms Goode was channeling for the composer, and while it lasted it felt like there could be no other interpretation possible.
Debussy’s Preludes, Book 2, reinforced that notion. Although his playing was loaded with emotion, in the opening “Brouillards” (“Fog”) he seemed more interested in architecture than sensuous atmosphere. In “Ondine” he shaped the music as a solid rather than a fluid — offering Debussy for people who love their Brahms.
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