Richard Goode at NCH: A beautiful recital communicated like intimate confidences between close friends

Richard Goode

National Concert Hall, Dublin

★★★★☆

Irish fans of the American pianist Richard Goode have had a rough time over the years. His Irish debut, scheduled for the Belfast Festival in 1999 was cancelled. He gave two concerts for the Dublin International Chamber Music Festival in intimate settings (the Royal College of Physicians in Ireland, where the concert was disturbed by a rogue external alarm, and the Royal Irish Academy in Dawson Street), but a 2016 programme of the three late Schubert piano sonatas bit the dust.

Goode turned 80 in June, and last Tuesday finally made it to the stage of the National Concert Hall, for a typically probing exploration of some of the pillars of his conservative but high-class repertoire, Bach, Chopin and Fauré.

Goode’s art is, on the surface, one of understatement. His playing is unshowy. Display is eschewed in favour of concentration on the inner life of the music. The challenges he presents himself with have little to do with keyboard fireworks or heavy projection.

He prioritises balances in a much more subtle way. Rather than concentrating on the manipulation of what composers have placed in the foreground, he works at magicking balances by the much more demanding route of toning down the backgrounds.

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That’s how he achieves such a relaxed sense of internal dialogue. By contrast with the archetype of flashy young virtuosos, temped to play that bit louder no matter how loud they are already playing, Goode takes control by creating painstakingly detailed backgrounds against which much more mildly-stated musical lines can stand out.

His three pieces by Fauré (the Barcarolle No. 3, and Nocturnes Nos 3 and 6) were mesmerisingly beautiful, not without excitement, but communicated like intimate confidences between close friends.

In Bach’s Partita in C minor, BWV 826, he wove the counterpoint with such intricacy it was as if he were spinning a kind of innovative musical spiderweb. Chopin’s Sonata in B minor, Op. 58, was persuasively done, though there were times when he sounded a little challenged, and he played the three Mazurkas of Chopin’s Op. 59, with a delicate, self-renewing rhythmic spring. A recital to remember.