The auditorium at the University of the District of Columbia was dark Sunday afternoon not in the sense that nothing was happening onstage, but because the pianist Richard Goode prefers to play with the lights dimmed, to create, as Washington Performing Arts President Jenny Bilfield said from the stage, a meditative atmosphere.

Is that the opposite of outreach, presenting classical music in a setting of quiet reverence? Or is it a sign of the times to think about the whole picture of the concert and to care about the ambiance as well as the music? The proof is in the playing, and Goode, 73, a musicians musician, offered a performance of Bach and Chopin to more than satisfy not only the faithful but also anyone else who happened to be in attendance.

The program fell neatly into two halves. On the first were four selections from Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier, starting with the intricate triple fugue of the F-sharp-minor pairing through to the fluid stream of notes of the prelude in B. Although Goode sounded a little hesitant in a few places, his touch slightly rough, the lines in this prelude spooled from his fingers like oil.

[Richard Goode lends a lively voice to an exuberant all-Bach program]

Real love informs Goodes performance, and if that love becomes part of the focus of the afternoon, sharing place with the music as the player conducted his left hand with his right, sang along in places or paused with relish after the drama of opening notes of the A-minor prelude the listeners did not mind.

Each half of the program had one longer work surrounded by groups of shorter ones: the sixth partita, in E minor, on the Bach half; the third ballade, quiet and singing, on the Chopin half, embedded in a bouquet of nocturnes and mazurkas and topped off with the Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat. After the intricacies of the Bach partita, Goodes Chopin seemed a contrast indeed, with the E-flat nocturne (Op. 55, No. 2) as sweet and full as rose water against the clear Bach rain.

[Pianist Richard Goode makes an unforgettable evening]

But the initial focus on Bach attuned the ear to the intricacies within the Chopin pieces, such as the little hints of dissonance twanging at the edges of some of the phrases, laid in at a slight angle to make those voluptuous lines stick in the mind in, for instance, the C-minor nocturne (Op. 48, No. 1). A group of four mazurkas emerged as distinct, taut little worlds of rhythm and color. And if Goode was over-emotive in some aspects of his presentation, he was not overblown in his playing; indeed, the opening of the ballade was almost too restrained, leaving room for more effect when he finally unleased some fortissimos toward the end.

The last piece, the Polonaise-Fantaisie, was an exploration through the stars, dreamy and a little anticlimactic in that the heart of this program were the short bursts of insight offered in each of the smaller pieces that made it up. The encore returned to Bach with the Sarabande from the fourth partita, in D a small punctuation mark on an afternoon full of them.

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A pianist's personal meditation: Richard Goode plays Bach, Chopin - Washington Post