Richard Goode and Jonathan Biss, duo pianists
Jordan Hall, Boston
February 7, 2010
This may be only a personal pet peeve, but I’ve never understood the classical music habit of equating “cerebral” with emotionally distant and even a little boring. I mean, I’m sure there are mathematicians who get pretty worked up about what they’re doing. In fact, there’s an entire subcategory of music that draws additional emotional power from its intellectual rigor. Combine that with performers eager to communicate that intricate zeal, and musical experiences don’t get much more nourishing. Case in point: the pianists Jonathan Biss and Richard Goode, who teamed up for a Celebrity Series duo recital on Sunday in Boston. They programmed a bunch of cerebral music. It was exciting as hell.
I was curious to hear how their varied tones—Goode’s burnished old-school ties, Biss’s somewhat brighter, Apollonian briskness—would mesh. Pretty well, as it turns out, thanks to some canny assignment of melodic primo and harmonic secondo parts. In more Romantic repertoire, Goode took the lower end, a lush foundation for Biss’s sparkle; for modern sounds, Biss gave the secondo crisp architecture, while Goode brought out the expressive line of the musical surface. What unites them is a similar active intelligence, the charge they get—and pass on—from engaging the source material in sharp, lively conversation.
Their reading of Franz Schubert’s D. 947 Allegro in A minor earned Diabelli’s nickname for the piece, “Lebensstürme” (”Life’s Storms”)—it was a dark and stormy curtain-raiser, the pair clearly enjoying the expressionist opportunity of Schubert’s concentrated rhetoric. Then came a rarity—Robert Schumann’s Six Canonic Studies, op. 56. It shouldn’t be a rarity, but Schumann wrote it for the pedal piano, a hands-and-feet instrument rarely seen outside of a museum. Biss and Goode performed it in a two-piano arrangement by Claude Debussy, an interesting intersection of Debussy’s ability to put his stamp on other people’s notes and Schumann’s anticipation of the musical future. The Studies are terrific music, Schumann fashioning the canonic restriction into one flawless mood after another—a sweet zephyr of flowing thirds, a rich folk-like lied, a spiky witches’ sabbath. The finale feints at a full chorale and fugue before shifting into a noble recessional to rival Elgar.
The duo’s performance of Beethoven’s own arrangement of his Grosse Fuge showed that late Beethoven still has the power to rub people the wrong way. Much of the intermission discussion was decidedly negative—the hammer and decay of the piano stripped away the richness and sweep of the string original, many people thought, and Biss and Goode’s somewhat impish interpretation of the major-key episodes trivialized a solemn monument. But I rather liked it, the harshness of the timbre, the relentless percussiveness, the emotional conception of a kind of manic-depressive colossus—an old-school punk-rock paradox, anti-social and in your face about it. It was kind of a caricature of Beethoven, but an appropriate one: his intrepidity adjusted for inflation.
Another arrangement—Igor Stravinsky’s own two-piano reduction of his 1957 ballet Agon—was a contrasting audacity, aphoristic and polished. Agon was Stravinsky’s foray into serialism, and you can almost hear him regarding each sound and harmony as if with a jeweler’s loupe, turning it in his hands, fascinated with each detail. The transcription doesn’t actually lose much in its x-ray translation—it’s what Stravinsky always tried to get orchestras to do anyway—and the performance was marvelously astute, Goode and Biss maintaining the cool-marble dramatic proportions, but finding brief pockets of warm lyricism: edge-of-your-seat beauty.
They finished with the erudite virtuosity of Debussy’s En blanc et noir, a 1915 masterpiece, one of the most understatedly devastating echoes of the Great War in the repertoire. The opening echoes Debussy’s typical Impressionism, but the effect is uneasy rather than ravishing; every gesture, every texture is a little more compressed and fraught, the splendor a little more desperate in the face of its impending demise. And then the center: soft and gnomic, a frozen restlessness, overlaid with the tolling of the chorale “Ein feste Burg,” both menace and lament. The final movement shifts the mood into the clear, dry ironies of neoclassicism, a bleak defiance. The performance was marvelous, the modulations between extroverted flair and inward rumination managed with sympathetic conviction.
The encore was another perfect match of intellectual game with expressive urgency: more Schumann, the “Abendlied” from his op. 85 Klavierstücke für kleine und große Kinder (”for small and large children”). The piece is actually for three hands—an adult, presumably, laying down the chorale-like accompaniment while a child spins out a melody. And yet, it’s one of Schumann’s most hauntingly lovely creations, rich and elegaic, the singing line taking insistently searching twists and turns. The music sounds as if it engaged every ounce of Schumann’s cerebral energy. Honestly, is any less needed to get one’s mind around the logic of the heart?
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