Ravinia 2019, Issue 4, Week 7

“It gives me a special pleasure to play surrounded by paintings.” Above: The ceiling of San Giovanni Evangelista; Below: Arthur Rackham’s The Fairies are Exquisite Dancers , which possibly inspired one of Debussy’s Préludes from many of the city’s best private galleries. So, as part of his trips to the school, he began visiting the art spaces, seeing his rst works, for example, by the sometimes whimsical th-century master Paul Klee. “I was very excited by that,” he says. He also recalls being impressed by an exhibition of Antoni Tàpies, one of his rst experiences with abstraction. “One of my thoughts was, this could be art too,” he says. While enjoying art is a kind of hobby for Goode, a diversion from the many hours he spends practicing, rehearsing, performing, or sitting on an airplane, he was quick to point out that there are revealing ties between the pursuit and his music-making. Art enters his mind when he is thinking about composers like Claude Debussy, for whom the visual and auditory are closely related. [Six of Debussy’s Préludes conclude Goode’s Ravinia recital, including two that may have been directly inspired by Arthur Rackham illustrations.] e pianist makes a distinction between the more linear painting of, say, Mantegna, a th-cen- tury Italian master and the more painterly style of Rembrandt. “When I think about the Rembrandt self-portraits that I love and Rembrandt’s painting in general, I think about the painterliness,” he says. “I think about the mixture of things. I think about not depending on so much line but what happens when paint can be another reality in the sense of space and light.” Goode carries over that separation to music. He doesn’t consider impasto (the heavy application of paint) or chiaroscu- ro (strong contrasts between light and dark) when taking on what is to him the more linear music of Haydn or Mozart. But he does think of those artistic qualities when playing the music of Brahms and particularly Debussy, who is seen as the rst Impressionist composer. “I think the visual element enters into it in that case—the way you play the piano, how much pedal you use, how you delineate lines,” Goode says. “It’s part of your thought, conscious or unconscious, it seems to me.” e pianist went on to make connections between the man- uscripts of Johann Sebastian Bach with their scroll lines and Baroque painting of the time that put an accent on the curve. “I think about that o en in playing music—not only Baroque music, but particularly that music,” he says. “You have notes that look equal on the page, but in the manuscripts they don’t look so equal, and in the ear, I think they are not so equal.” In order to sound right, Goode believes equal notes have to be a little bit skewed. Or put di erently, they have to be made “unequal in just the right way.” He compares it to a bow stroke on a violin, which by its nature can never be perfectly consis- tent from start to nish. “You have to create that inequality, you have to create the bow,” he says. “ at for me is almost an obsession. I’m not sure how much of that is visual, but it certainly has a visual counterpart in the brushstroke, say, and the curved line.” For in Richard Goode’s world, art and music, the seen and heard are never far apart. Kyle MacMillan served as classical music critic for the Denver Post from 2000 through 2011. He currently freelances in Chicago, writing for such publications and websites as the Chicago Sun-Times , Wall Street Journal , Opera News , and Classical Voice of North America . 36 RAVINIA MAGAZINE | JULY 15 – JULY 28, 2019