BEETHOVEN The Complete Piano Concertos

Richard Goode, Budapest Festival Orchestra / Ivan Fischer

 

Fifteen years ago, pianist Richard Goode made history with the release on Nonesuch of Beethoven: The Complete Sonatas, the first recording of this repertoire in its entirety undertaken by an American musician. This 10-disc set brought Goode a Grammy nomination as well as international acclaim and an ever-growing audience. The Washington Post declared that Goode “must be counted among the leading Beethoven pianists of our time.” The New York Times called the project “a landmark” and pronounced Goode’s playing “remarkable for its organic naturalness and its combination of freshness and maturity.” Now, with the highly anticipated released of Beethoven: The Complete Piano Concertos, Goode once again ventures where few have gone before him, being one of a handful of American-born musicians to comprehensively record this work, and the first to do so in nearly 20 years.

 

Goode recorded this three-disc set in June and November of 2005 at the National Concert Hall in Budapest, Hungary, with the Budapest Festival Orchestra. The five concertos were conducted by Ivan Fischer, founder and music director of the Orchestra and principal conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, DC. Says Goode, “It has been a great pleasure for me to perform and record the Beethoven concertos with Iván Fischer and his remarkable orchestra. Their superb brio, musical vitality, and total absence of routine have been an inspiration. I hope these performances will be faithful to the spirit of these great works and also reflect the joy of our collaboration.”

 

When Goode appeared with the Budapest Festival Orchestra at the Barbican in June 2005 to perform Concerto No. 2, in B Flat, Op. 19, the Independent’s classical reviewer noted that, “Fischer found unaffectedly fresh nuances in the orchestral writing, which Goode proceeded to match by the variations of touch and expression with which he seemed to re-inflect or vivify the most routine runs and flourishes of the solo part, meanwhile creating a luminous sense of time suspended near the end of the slow movement. Their reading of the grander, starker Piano Concerto No 3 in C minor, Op 36, was equally revelatory; intent with contained tension even in the ostensibly serene central Largo, and with an irresistible lifting of spirits in the dancing final pages.”

 

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