Piano recital produces fireworks after slow start

Light the blue touch-paper and retire. These could have been the directions prior to pianist Richard Goode’s recital in Perth’s Concert Hall on Sunday.

It fizzled a bit to start off, took a while to properly ignite, then – bang! A pretty indifferent Mozart sonata morphed into some wonderful Janacek and Brahms snippets that were too few and too short.

Add to that some delightful Debussy Preludes and Beethoven’s Op 110 sonata and the Mozart soon became a distant memory.

It was perfect, technically, but lacked some passion. But after that, a window opened and Goode came to life.

Janacek’s miniatures On The Overgrown Path and Brahms’ Op 118 Klavierstucke are small in stature but huge in character and full of colour and texture.

Goode might be in his mid-70s but the digits are as fluent as ever and his marvellous rapidity across the keyboard is still 100% intact.

Dubussy’s Preludes exuded even more intense expression and fulfilling interpretation.

These, and the two preceding works, were truly excellent. I felt the Beethoven would be the sterner test, but one that would be passed with flying colours.

This work has appeared quite often at the concert hall’s Piano Sunday series and while Goode’s performance didn’t have the flair and flamboyance of others, it certainly didn’t lack excellent technique and ability.

Goode captured the relative simplicity of the opening movement before Beethoven launches into the complexities that follow. He made the Arioso sing out and the exuberant final passages flowed with the practised and precise authority of a pianist of Goode’s standing and experience.