Richard Goode's superlative, life-enhancing piano recital on Sunday at Macalester College was that rare thing: a whole greater than its parts. Part of the Frederic Chopin Society's 25th anniversary season, the concert was fittingly Chopin-centric, with German composers flanking Chopin in the first half and Frenchmen alternating with him in the second. Attentive to key relationships between pieces -- an old nicety, now seldom seen -- the program was also a history lesson, tellingly situating Chopin amid his predecessors and successors.

Bach, predictably, provided the historical and tonal foundations of Goode's enterprise. This was Bach on the modern Steinway, of course, but only a pedant could resist its rhythmic point and contrapuntal clarity. After Bach, a Chopin group: the grandly expansive C-Minor Nocturne (Op. 48, No. 1) and four mazurkas, the latter played less as dances than as yearning-filled recollections of them.

Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata followed, here framed as a cousin to Chopin. Goode's account of the famous Adagio masterfully sustained the tension between its placid surface and the anguish beneath. The Allegretto, treated with exceptional gentleness, was just what Liszt called it: "a flower between two abysses." And the Presto's song-like second subject has never sounded so Chopinesque.

After intermission came two Debussy Études, painted in lustrous colors with a soupçon of irony, and Gabriel Fauré's marvelous D-flat Nocturne (Op. 63), its airborne middle section bewitchingly played. (Apart from the Requiem, we hear almost nothing of this great composer. Why?) Surrounding Fauré were Chopin's brooding Nocturne in C-sharp Minor (Op. 27, No. 1) and, to close, the epic Polonaise in F-sharp Minor (Op. 44) -- a polonaise wrapped around a mazurka that cunningly joined the program's two halves.

Though he has plenty of technique, Goode does not present himself as a virtuoso. (What we call virtuosity is more an attitude than a physical skill.) Even in bravura pieces he declines to call attention to himself. And his bows to Sunday's audience seemed not ritualized gestures but expressions of humility.

Larry Fuchsberg writes frequently about music.