Richard Goode is an intensely practical musician. Most pianists of his stature make a fetish of the instruments they play, and would never think of using the orchestral piano for a concerto. But here Goode played Beethoven concertos on the same instrument the Budapest Festival Orchestra's keyboard player had just used in Bartok's Dance Suite. It's a refreshing attitude, but then Goode's approach to everything on the platform lacks affectation. With its crystalline, neutral sound his music-making can sound plain and unadorned, but that belies the expressive detail with which he invests it, responding to every nuance and harmonic colour.
In these two concerts with conductor Ivan Fischer and the BFO Goode played the first three Beethoven piano concertos; they will return to the Barbican in November with the Fourth and Fifth. Fischer's Beethoven conducting is equally uncomplicated, and there's real chemistry in the partnership, with ideas traded back and forth, a sense of wonder when the music twists into more remote keys, and a delight in its moments of unbuttoned exuberance. It all came together most convincingly for a wonderfully supple account of the Second Concerto, but there were also impressive sections in the Third - a beautifully paced slow movement, for instance - and in the more strictly classical contours of the First.
Fischer framed the concertos with Bartok. Apart from his pungent account of the Dance Suite, the first concert also included the suite from the Miraculous Mandarin ballet, paced beautifully by Fischer to the climax of the chase music with which the suite so precipitously ends. The second began with a rarity - Bartok's own orchestrations of the Hungarian Peasant Songs, which gave the BFO the chance to show off the depth of their plush string tone - and ended with the Concerto for Orchestra. Fischer's account was certainly very different from Boulez's overwhelming performance with the Chicago Symphony at the Festival Hall two months ago: less brash, more strongly characterised, though still a fine showcase for the BFO's deft woodwind and implacable brass.
