CLOCKING in at 40 minutes, Richard Goode's was not the longest of this
year's innovative series of late-night recitals at the Usher Hall. But
since the Hammerklavier Sonata -- a work which, as the programme note
pointed out, makes as many virtuoso demands on the listener as it does
on the performer -- formed the subject matter, nobody could complain of
being short changed.
When Beethoven completed it in 1819, it was immediately recognised as
a sonata unprecedented in scale and piano technique. Even today, with
its long slow movement and final fugue, it can seem as much a monster as
a masterpiece. Happily, on Tuesday, Goode did not set out to tame it.
The physical and mental effort he put into it was obvious long before,
at the start of the finale, he propped up a copy of the music on the
piano and donned his spectacles. It was a security measure that did
nothing to diminish one's respect for a player who earlier had brought
elating verve to the first movement and scherzo.
Goode, a 49-year-old American with a flair for the Viennese classics,
is described in The New Grove as a sensitive, intelligent musician whose
performances have an opinionated ring. It's a fair description, and one
which shows why he coped to convincingly with the quirks of the
Hammerklavier, its whimsical digressions, sudden surges of energy,
obsessive trills and mercurial fingerwork at the top of the register.
It was a performance always volatile, instantly alert to every
situation, whether in banging out Beethoven's detached chords or in
deliberately blurring (or so it seemed) the jerky rhythms of the scherzo
in an almost impressionistic way.
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