For Richard Goode the idea that Chopin is a specialist’s province, likely to prove treacherous or elusive to those steeped in Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, is a challenge, a stimulus rather than a block to musical endeavour. Yet I have to say that the qualities which hold him in such good stead in Beethoven – a rare integrity and forthrightness – seem more limited in Chopin. Calm and musicianly, this is essentially for those who like their Chopin ‘low in tone’, from a chamber music perspective rather than ablaze with revolutionary fervour or sinking into a darker introspection. Certainly you won’t find yourself exclaiming, as Serkin once did of Horowitz, “his Chopin is like a fire-ball exploding”, or feel like William Kapell that “if people knew what Horowitz’s tone meant he’d be banned from the keyboard”. Such violence and necromancy, even neurosis, lie outside Goode’s scope and intention as he calls Chopin’s genius to order and imposes a sweet reasonableness and classical bias on even his wildest eloquence. Personally I found him too genial and relaxed in the Barcarolle, taking us on a comfortable journey through Chopin’s easily troubled waters. The Fourth Scherzo is insufficiently quixotic, and in the miraculous E flat Nocturne, Op. 55 his sense of texture is more solid than luminous, the melody, with its heady prophecy of Faurean radiance, and modulatory cunning, hardly allowed to float free of its moorings.
Yet Goode is gently rather than ostentatiously sensitive to Chopin’s romantic polyphony in the Polonaise-fantaisie and in his selection of Mazurkas his piquancy remembers both rudimentary dance origins and their transformation into the richest poetry, into confession and idiosyncrasy. Even here I would have welcomed a greater sense of Chopin’s alternately exalted and neurasthenic spirit but others, I know, will warm to such poise and moderation. The recordings are as sound as the performances.BM