There is something specially attractive about Richard Goode’s collaborations with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. They are occasional and the recordings are made when the musicians feel the time is right, presumably after a series of public concerts. The last appeared about 18 months ago (the Concertos in D minor, K466, and B flat, K456 – Nonesuch, 4/97). It’s a pity that Goode has no plans to record a complete set of the concertos.
The opening of the C major Concerto, K503, sounds tremendous, with a leathery thwack to the kettledrums and the orchestra suitably weighty. Although the acoustic is a bit dry, there is a satisfying depth to the sonority, and the balance and placing of the instruments – with the wind as soloists and chorus, and in relation to the piano as well as to the rest of the orchestra – is absolutely perfect. All the colours are vivid. At 3'35'' in the first movement (the first track) you hear the solo piano exchanging forte chords with the wind with the force that Mozart must have intended. In contrast to many players of the modern instrument, Richard Goode does not pull his punches and makes this first movement a most glorious procession, imposing but never ponderous. Listening to him, I recall other good accounts of it which have often struck me as a mite slow, sedate even, whereas his tempo has a propulsive energy and an underlying fitness that makes possible some relaxation of it in the broader paragraphs of the solo part. The development section, based on a march-like theme which always reminds me of the Marseillaise, sounds for once like a real discourse between the parties instead of a series of statements. There’s no extant cadenza to the movement by Mozart himself; Goode supplies his own and it does very nicely.
The distinction is sustained in the other movements. The tempo of the finale may strike you at first as unexpectedly quick, and the brilliance of the first solo startling, but the animation is attractive and there’s no irrelevant agitation of the movement’s surface. And what teamwork! How do these people do it without a conductor? Is it a workers’ co-op? Technical precision in ensemble-playing can be brought about readily enough, given rehearsal, but the musical focus sustained here is not something often encountered outside chamber music. Wonderful slow movement too, flowing admirably, and it’s a tricky one to get right – in Charles Rosen’s description, “a beautiful combination of simplicity and lavish decoration, with a great variety and contrast of rhythms”. Incidentally, in those downward scales through nearly five octaves – the compass of Mozart’s instrument – you hear what a fine recording of the piano this is.
The C major Concerto, K503, has rarely been recorded so successfully, but I fancy the E flat, K271, has been done better. Many of the virtues I’ve annotated are apparent again. It needs a different rhetoric, of course, and Goode supplies it, but he waxes and wanes and there’s something a shade impersonal about him. Not cool exactly but diffident, as if reluctant to project himself as a personable soloist. My reservations concern the first movement principally, where it’s as if he were saying: “I do not need to attract your attention, this beautiful thing Mozart has made we are going to lay out before you”. I would have preferred him to make us experience it more acutely. Doubts about his stance returned once or twice later on, notably in the minuet episode of the finale. This is a Mozart concerto record to give exceptional pleasure however. It aims high and wherever you sample it there is no gap between intention and achievement.'