YOUNG PIANIST ALREADY A MASTER OF THE 88 KEYS

To some people, written music is a string of black dots on a piece of paper. But to Gustavo Romero it’s personality and feeling and knowing how to unleash those qualities.

Romero, a 20-year-old Chula Vista native, makes a careful distinction between “artists” and “pianists.”

“There are plenty of pianists who are brilliant--great pianists in practice rooms. But you get them on stage for an hour and a half and they fall apart. After talent, it has a lot to do with personality, how strongly you feel things and how you can unleash those things through your art.

“What’s on paper is purely just black dots. It’s nothing on paper; it’s words; it’s all just time calculations. I give what’s not on paper.”

Romero’s artistry propelled him to New York and the Juilliard School of Music six years ago. At 8 p.m. Monday, San Diego residents will get to hear him perform in a benefit recital at the Old Globe Theatre. Proceeds will be shared by the Girls’ and Boys’ Clubs of Chula Vista and the Old Globe.

His program will include the three movements of Ravel’s “Gastard de la Nuit,” which is “probably one of the most difficult piano works ever written,” Romero said. “I can hardly wait to play this.”

When Romero went to purchase the Ravel piece, the music store clerks weren’t confident he was ready for it. “They thought I shouldn’t even own the piece or look at it even,” he recalled.

But Romero is not about to be stopped.

It doesn’t take long to perceive that this slight young man who speaks in softly controlled sentences is more than serious. He is compelled, following a course that led him, at age 4, to a neighbor’s piano, and last season to his first Carnegie Hall performance.

When he was 16, a Dallas critic called him “an artist--not a prodigy. He has something to say, and he says it with clarity, seriousness and maturity.” A year later the Washington Post said, “Romero is already a major talent.”

Romero explains matter-of-factly: “Certain people are here in this world to do certain things. If you’ve been given a talent to manipulate these 88 keys in such a way and you feel comfortable doing that, then I think it’s your duty to learn a substantial amount of repertoire and illuminate these works of genius and bring them to the public to the best of your ability, and at the same time, to enjoy that.

“There’s so much literature to play, so much music to play. I feel that’s most important to me now, to play as much as I can.”

Romero has had some remarkable opportunities to carry out his mission. There was his Carnegie Hall performance, with the Youth Symphony of New York, of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3, which gained a standing ovation from a crowd that included Isaac Stern, Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Horowitz. Before that, there were Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concert No. 1 at the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and appearances with the New York Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta at age 14. He has also played with the Boston Pops, the Erie Philharmonic and the Chautauqua Symphony Orchestra, to select a few.

Next year he will embark on a 35-concert tour of the United States, which includes a return to Carnegie Hall.

Despite these heady accomplishments, Romero’s concern seems to be less with the worldly trappings of a concert pianist than with the inner world of the music. Since the day he was drawn to that piano, two doors up the street from his parents’ home, his ability to learn a piece “literally overnight” has helped him devour large quantities of music literature.

During those first few years, Romero taught himself how to read music from a World Book Encyclopedia. It wasn’t until he was 9 or 10 that he got his first piano and started formal study.

“It was all instinctive, something that was very interesting to me,” Romero said. “For others it was baseball, checkers; for me it was this enormous world that I started discovering little by little, and it began to grow inside as I discovered more things about it.

“Once you discover who these great geniuses are whose music you get to play, then you realize that you can do this for the rest of your life. Then, instinctively, you discover things, certain facilities that you’ve been given that others don’t have--that helps you sort of come to a conclusion.

“I don’t think you wake up one day and say, ‘I decided when I graduate high school that I’m going to be a concert pianist, not a major in English.’ I think if you have to make a decision between music as a concert pianist and majoring in math, you’d better take majoring in math because there should never be a decision. I mean, yeah, if you want to be just a pianist and teacher, but when you’re talking about artists who have something, really something so important to give . . . that happens from the very beginning.”

Romero’s fingers flutter rapidly and naturally, with a motion that comes from years of practice and training, as he talks about the sense of loss and euphoria after a long performance, about fields of energy and about sharing the composer’s frame of mind with an audience.

“Every piece is just an exploration of the character and the technical subtleties and difficulties, all these to be mastered to make them effective in performance. If I start (learning) ‘Gastard,’ of course I start with finding technical things that have to be worked out and then they have to be perfected and worked on, but toward the end it becomes much more. You begin to think of atmospheres that you want to create, and you read the poems and the character of each movement and you begin to get images that the sounds evoke.”

Calling himself a nostalgist, Romero admits that he doesn’t much care for the random sounds of 20th Century composers. He prefers the way Chopin “wrote so beautifully for the piano. It’s all so very comfortable to play.” He loves to play Ravel, “just because he thinks so much orchestrally. He’s sort of sitting at the keyboard with this frame of mind, so he explores every possibility to get the piano to almost do what the orchestra does.”

Both composers will be included in Romero’s Old Globe program, with two Scarlatti sonatas and Brahms’ Sonata No. 3, Opus 5.

In addition to helping worthy hometown causes, the concert will give Romero a chance to combat what he calls “this age of wonderful technological advancements,” of “digital sound and perfect recordings and Concorde jets and microwave ovens and instant coffee,” with his personal campaign to preserve “works of so much emotional content, full of so many human qualities.”