BUECHNER AT AMBASSADOR

He looks like the high-school valedictorian, somewhat befuddled, in his first day on the college campus. He wanders on stage aimlessly, bows to his audience with some timidity. One can already predict that his glasses will soon slip down his nose; he projects a certain helplessness.

Then David Buechner plays the piano, and the plainness of his appearance, the tentativeness of his entrance, are lost in the authority of his music making.

In a debut recital (in the Gold Medal series) at Ambassador Auditorium on Monday night, the 26-year-old American musician, winner in the last six years of a wheelbarrow full of pianistic prizes, confirmed the promise of all those awards. He did so by way of a sovereign command of the keyboard, clear musical communication and a high polish on all his performances.

Buechner’s modesty at the keyboard proved charming, especially since he possesses and uses a first-class, comprehensive technical apparatus. But technique is not foremost in his playing; genuine and earnest musicality is.

His program, including the important area of encores, had been put together sensibly, cannily and with impeccable taste.

It began on a plateau of seriousness, with Mozart’s A-minor Sonata, K. 310, then rose to the heights of Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasy; it offered an exotic and colorful second half in shortish works by Janacek, Martinu and Chabrier. The two encores were Chopin’s practically forgotten “Contredanse” in G-flat and, in the same-sounding but non-homonymous key of F-sharp, Jacques Ibert’s “Le Petit Ane Blanc.”

Throughout, cohesive statement, unmistakable musical line and emotional clarity marked everything Buechner played. If his Mozart is not yet personal, his Schubert displayed integrity of structure and a firm, unyielding sense of continuity, as well as some of the handsomest legato octaves since Rudolf Firkusny (one of Buechner’s teachers).

And, if it was not thrilling to hear Martinu’s mediocre Fantasy and Toccata (1940), one had to respond to the urgency and poignancy of Buechner’s playing of Janacek’s affecting Sonata, “Oct. 1, 1905.” The original (piano solo) version of Emmanuel Chabrier’s “Bourree Fantasque,” virtuosic and irresistible, closed the program proper.