Review: Pianist Richard Goode in a musical melange

The artistic solidity on which Richard Goode made his name has given way to encroaching adventurousness over the years, though the limitations of that were intermittently apparent at his Philadelphia Chamber Music Society recital Tuesday at the Kimmel Center.

The program was a typical Goode cross section: Unjustly neglected Mozart (Adagio in B minor), the core repertoire of Beethoven's Piano Sonata in F-sharp major Op. 78, ongoing explorations of Debussy, and a relatively new acquaintance with Schumann's Humoreske.

Though the Beethoven seemed a little tired in this outing, Debussy's Children's Corner showed what has made Goode an eminent pianist. He brings a distinctively weighted touch to the keyboard - notes are sounded without being Germanically announced - while the music's contours are rounded and graceful but never vague, the obvious exception being "Golliwogg's Cakewalk," whose high-spirited vaudeville insists on sharper contrasts.

Goode also finds an inner logic with each piece. Though Debussy was a genteel revolutionary, Children's Corner wasn't about wondering at the strangeness of natural phenomena (as in La Mer). No, this is indoor music exploring more mundane experience with alternative logic. Generally, one might say Goode's approach was that of the great 1950s French pianists such as Jacques Fevrier, who weren't out to paint lovely exterior pictures with music, but to deal more simply with what's inside.

Similarly, Brahms' Klavierstucke Op. 76 turn up as flashy encore pieces, and though Goode was happy to tap the music's hearty humor and deep passion, his solid sense of classicism kept him from going too far, or beyond anything that the pianos of Brahms' time could project. Sadly, his Kimmel Center piano went increasingly out of tune - as did his sense of involvement.

Goode's performance of Schumann's Humoreske is hard to account for. The concluding minutes had the love and passion of the composer's bipolar creative personality. But the rest could be downright alienating. At the start of the piece, the music's lyricism was rendered with a detached chill. Tempos were needlessly brisk.

Schumann sometimes drives pianists to make odd decisions in the interest of overall balance - in works that sprawl no matter what anybody does. But at times, Goode was a speed demon, with tempos that made the music unintelligible with big, noisy sonorities. A few years back, the venerable Menahem Pressler said that very few true Schumann pianists are active today. On the basis of this concert, Goode is not one of them.