MUSIC REVIEWS : Goode’s Pianism Detailed, Deep, Emotionally Pointed

Richard Goode was a dark horse for so many years, it’s hard to believe the American pianist now occupies a place among the musical elite. Still, that place is secure, as Goode’s latest Southland recital proved, again, Sunday night in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

Experience has taught us that not all “experts” are true authorities; sometimes, reputations are created by hype and wishful thinking.

Goode, 50, who earned his present musical stature through a long accumulation of memorable live and recorded performances, is a Beethoven/Schubert specialist who also happens to play Debussy with a color-palette of amazing resourcefulness. He seems to have all this music in his blood as well as in his brain and fingers, and his willingness to share it with his listeners is a gift for which we can all be grateful.

The sharing in Goode’s latest local recital extended to four works by Beethoven--two large-scale and two shorter pieces played as encores--the relatively neglected “Reliquie” Sonata of Schubert and Debussy’s “Children’s Corner” Suite. Throughout, the combination of musical mastery, technical supremacy, mellow tone, projection of thought and artistic self-effacement produced performances as deep as they were detailed, as emotionally pointed as they were unself-conscious.

At the start of this program, Goode chose to play only the two completed movements of Schubert’s Sonata in C, D. 840, thus erecting a serious and contrasting ad-hoc overture to Beethoven’s many-faceted and technically exigent “Eroica” Variations.

For his second-half, he revived his remembered, and beautifully accomplished, reading of the ultra-Gallic “Coin des Enfants” as an introduction to Beethoven’s Germanic Opus 101, the first sonata in which the composer used the designation “Hammerklavier,” and the first of his last five works in that form.

Revelations and insights characterized all these performances, achieved without Angst or undue commotion by the relaxed but alert pianist. Is there a shrink in Goode’s past? Who knows? Who cares? All we hear is the music.

For the record, Goode’s encores were both by Beethoven: the Bagatelle in B minor, Opus 126, and the slow movement from the “Pathetique” Sonata, Opus 13.