MUSIC REVIEWS : PIANIST SIEGEL IN MOZART PROGRAM

It’s the smart pianist who knows how to puff up a career by offering an added inducement to the standard recital, say, words to go with his music. So when Jeffrey Siegel returned Monday to Smothers Theatre at Pepperdine University for another in his series of “Keyboard Conversations,” he must have sensed success. After all, the hall nearly overflowed with presumably happy respondents.

But it wasn’t really a conversation that Siegel devised, so much as a music appreciation course--this one titled “The Romanticism of Mozart.” Where other verbally inclined performers have put together programs musing on the nature of a featured composer or reading excerpts of his letters or tracing a particular theme throughout his music, Siegel was content to regurgitate a straight biography--which, after “Amadeus,” seems a rather superfluous thing to do.

That done, he intermittently repaired to the keyboard for an analysis of the selected works--the B-minor Adagio, K. 540; A-minor Sonata, K. 310; C-minor Fantasia, K. 396, and Variations on “Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman,” K. 265--that included definitions of such basic terms from the musical lexicon as appoggiatura, legato, staccato, Alberti bass, minor and major mode.

The zeal with which Siegel demonstrated and expounded on his material was enlivening. But, in the end, one had to wonder whether he robbed himself of the necessary concentration for playing the script Mozart wrote. In fact, this observer did learn something new: Getting into the composer’s mind--for the purpose of performing his music--requires a quietude obviated by Siegel’s verbal outpourings.

Predictably, those outpourings amounted to far less than Mozart’s actual legacy. The chance to hear yet another interpretation of masterpieces (what a recital implies) is invariably more enticing than a hack music lesson.

As it turned out, Siegel’s narrative was a cliche-ridden thing in which he talked about “pauses pregnant with meaning.” But more egregious than that was his central assertion: “Mozart’s solo piano music is (wrongly) thought to be lightweight, inconsequential stuff.” (!) Tell that to Alfred Brendel and Alicia de Larrocha, not to mention the musical hordes.

If Siegel had redeemed himself as a pianist, there might have been something to salvage. Heaven knows there’s more to Mozart than the animated, fluent and energetic qualities he brought to bear. Try profundity and refinement. Maybe next time Siegel will devote himself to their search.