Pianist Richard Goode (photograph by Steve Riskind, courtesy of SFP)
Last night in Herbst Theatre San Francisco Performances (SFP) brought its first full post-pandemic season to a conclusion with the final program in its 2021–2022 Piano Series. The program was a solo recital by Richard Goode, making his fourteenth appearance as an SFP artist. Goode structured his program around two late-period sonatas by the two “later” composers of the first “Viennese school,” Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert.
In each half of the program, the sonata was preceded by a short work from a later period. Robert Schumann’s Opus 2 “Papillons” served as an “overture” to Schubert’s D. 845 sonata in A minor. The intermission was then followed by Béla Bartók’s Sz. 71 collection of fifteen Hungarian peasant songs, which preceded Beethoven’s Opus 101 sonata in A major. Taken as a whole, the program provided a diversity of engaging “reflections” in the ways in which the selections related to each other.
The pedant in me wondered why the two sonatas were not played in chronological order. Upon further reflection, however, I came to the conclusion that Goode felt the entire evening should conclude in a major key, rather than in the shadows of Schubert’s A minor composition. Indeed, D. 845 is more than just an early venture into movements with extended durations. It was composed at the same time that the composer was working on his D. 810 string quartet in D minor, which includes the variations on the D. 531 song entitled “Der Tod und das Mädchen” (Death and the maiden). D. 810 kept Schubert occupied between March of 1824 and January of 1826, suggesting that D. 845 may have been a product of “crosstalk” with both the quartet and the song it revisited as a theme for variations.
Goode was clearly aware of the dark shadows over each of the four movements of D. 845. However, he knew how to avoid overplaying the intensity of Schubert’s rhetoric. Through both dynamics and phrasing, he could establish that intensity while guiding the listener through the extended durations of each of the four movements. Presented in the context of Schumann’s Opus 2, which is basically an imagined evening at a dance party, complete with an affectionate leave-taking as the coda, there was a poignancy to Schubert’s more “solitary” rhetoric.
The coupling of Bartók to Beethoven was a bit more perplexing. Each of Beethoven’s “three-digit” piano sonatas was a major exploration of unknown territory with impressively compelling results. Goode may have felt that the more intense journey through Opus 101 needed a lighter introduction. The tunes that Bartók had collected and then arranged brought considerable relief in the wake of Schubert’s D. 845, and they also allowed the attentive listener to settle in before accompanying Goode on his journey through Opus 101.
While his execution of the sonata was one of the most compelling I have encountered, that impact seemed to reflect on the possibility that Opus 101 was a document of “trying things out.” As if to orient the listener, Beethoven provided verbal descriptions (in German), each of which is stated before the tempo (in Italian) is provided. In the verbal rhetoric of our own last century, one might even say that Beethoven was taking his listeners on a “magical mystery tour.” One never knew quite what to expect, but Goode’s interpretation of Beethoven’s marks on paper was so confidently positive that anyone serious about listening to this particular sonata would follow Goode wherever interpretation chose to lead him.
In that context Goode’s encore almost amounted to thanking the audience for making the entire journey with him. He turned back to Schubert with the third (in G-flat major) of the four impromptus collected as D. 899. His introspective interpretation may have been intended to induce further reflection among the many serious listeners that had relished every way station on the journey Goode had just led through his repertoire choices.
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