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Buy it on Amazon.
If you’re in the mood to hear five of the greater piano concertos ever written — and if my experience is any guide, it’s a very easy mood to slip into — then Richard Goode’s your man. Oh, there are other pianists who have climbed this mountain, but of the living practitioners, Goode stands alone. He’s given the bulk of his creative life to Beethoven. And it shows.
Beethoven had an ego as big as his talent and emotions that ran hotter than a blast furnace. He had heroes; he liked the idea of heroism. And as a composer, he tended to write grand heroic music. (No one has ever admired his Ninth Symphony more than Stalin, who saw it as a great propaganda weapon.)
But the most convenient place to start a romance with Richard Goode is… Mozart. Here’s Piano Concerto #18.
And here’s #20.
[To buy Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 18 & 20 from Amazon, click here. For the MP3 download, click here.]
Beethoven began his career as a pianist, and his writing for piano is something else. The 32 piano sonatas are the darlings of music critics; they show the enormous growth of Beethoven’s composition over the course of his working life. Goode has recorded The Complete Sonatas. I can only echo the reviews I’ve seen — Goode understands Beethoven, has absorbed this work so fully that, when he plays, it almost feels as if he’s composing or improvising.
If Richard Goode’s name is not familiar, that’s almost his design. He’s a scholar of the music he loves, not a brash showman — he was 47 before he gave his first solo recital in Carnegie Hall. He plays, he teaches, he reads. And the deeper the dive, the richer the music. It seems right that he was the first American-born pianist to record all the Beethoven sonatas. [To buy The Beethoven Sonatas from Amazon, click here.]
The drama of Goode’s playing is that he reduces the distance between the listener and the composer. He’s not looking for fresh interpretations. He knows what’s there. I find his description of Beethoven admirable: “Beethoven’s music is immensely powerful and positive. It is completely satisfying. Beethoven’s music is like a meal made up of all the basic food groups. There is nothing left out.”
That can also be said of Richard Goode.
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This article originally appeared on The Head Butler
Photo by Dominik Scythe on Unsplash