A gripping Goode recital

Richard Goode has two centers of gravity, and you couldn’t miss either one the moment he began his impressive UCLA Live recital at Royce Hall on Wednesday night. The first is physical. Once he touches the keyboard, his weight seems concentrated in his hands. Raising his fingers looks like a major effort. When he does so, it’s with a tense, sudden jerk.

Goode’s other center of gravity is musical. He plays as though Beethoven was at the core of his art and his ideas about the piano. His sound is often granitic, fingers ferociously detonating agitated passages, a heavy foot on the pedal to intensify the gruff roar. But he can just as easily make the rough smooth, lifting storm clouds and revealing a sense of beatific exultation, a lyrical melody becoming all simplicity, clarity and purity. At either extreme, his physical and poetic absorption in the score appears complete, as if it were the music that is playing him, not the other way around. Was Beethoven like that at the piano? It seems possible.

Unusually for Goode, whose recordings and recitals tend to concentrate on Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Schubert, he steered clear of Beethoven and most of Beethoven’s world Wednesday. The program instead concentrated on Romantic music meant to convey a great sense of occasion. It did begin with Mozart’s Sonata in A Minor, K. 330, but even that was an unusual statement by a 22-year-old composer who had suddenly had enough of trying to seduce his way into superficial society and was determined to show the world his real stuff.

The big piece, Schumann’s “Davidsbundlertanze,” consists of 18 dances for Schumann’s personal brotherhood of David, a band of feisty musicians who he imagined would defeat artistic Philistinism. After intermission, Goode played Janacek’s Piano Sonata (“1.X.1905”), the composer’s outraged reaction to the murder of a Czech nationalist worker in Brno protesting the city’s occupation by Austro-Hungarian troops. At the end of the recital came a rush of Chopin -- four mazurkas, a nocturne and a ballade -- all played through without pause.

In Goode’s urgent playing, there’s no nonsense. He exhibits little interest in a sense of style. Mozart and Janacek were born 100 years apart, but Goode, vehemently emphasizing obsessive rhythmic patterns, had them sounding like brothers who found their own passionate language in which to rebel against convention.

Goode’s Schumann and Chopin are less well-rounded. His “Davidsbundlertanze” was captivatingly monumental and wonderfully poetic. It was a grand conception, all of a piece. But it was also terribly serious, less concerned than ideally with Schumann the peacock showing off his cleverness for the pianist Clara Wieck, whom he was courting at the time.

Likewise, Goode’s Chopin is too intense to charm. He played Chopin as a searcher with no time to lose. That is to say, he simply attacked the music for all it was worth. One might like a little more breath, but Goode did nevertheless bring a severe Bachian clarity and spiritual concentration to the Nocturne in E-Flat, Opus 55, No. 2, and a Beethovenian vigor to the Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, so that each held the listener in its grip.

Indeed, that vise-like grip is Goode’s ultimate power as a pianist. Whether you always agree with his approach hardly matters. It’s not about you but about him. By giving the impression of being so strongly under music’s spell, he traps you too. It’s so strong a sensation, and so exhilarating, that, as when finishing a ski run or a roller-coaster ride, you want it all over again no matter how dizzying or frightening the experience. The audience in Royce was large and responded as if utterly thrilled by everything.