2ND REPLACEMENT : TORADZE IN WILD RECITAL AT PAVILION

Some events are ill-fated from the start.

On Feb. 25, Vladimir Ashkenazy was supposed to play a recital under Philharmonic auspices at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. It was canceled, reportedly because the Russian-born pianist was too busy being a conductor. The conflict didn’t stop him from playing a recital in Santa Barbara, but that is another matter for another day.

Exit Ashkenazy, enter Horacio Gutierrez.

The Cuban-born pianist, who already had been signed to play the Brahms Second with the Philharmonic early in March, agreed to return Tuesday night as a delayed substitute for Ashkenazy. Unfortunately, a viral infection precluded Gutierrez’s concerto performance, and the illness lingered to plague the recital this week.

Exit Gutierrez, enter Alexander Toradze.

The Soviet defector (class of ‘83) did indeed appear. The recital--his first in Los Angeles--did take place. The subscribers finally got a semblance of what they had purchased. One must be grateful for basic favors.

But it wasn’t a recital to warm the heart, quicken the pulse, stimulate the brain or lift the spirit. It was a wild and willful demonstration of keyboard gimmickry, an object lesson in the distortion of music for easy effect.

This should not imply that Toradze lacks talent. He certainly has original ideas about the works he mauls. He certainly can move his fingers around a keyboard with extraordinary speed and force, and without undue sacrifices in accuracy.

He certainly has an affinity for the ancient romantic manner that stresses the aura of rhapsody. He often seems to be making up the music as he goes along.

There is freshness and vitality in his playing, to be sure. There also is something vapid, something perverse, something superficial, something precious, something brutal.

This pianist tends toward extremes. When the composer wants his rhetoric soft and restrained, Toradze sighs and whispers himself into a state of sappy super-affectation. When the composer wants his rhetoric loud and climactic, Toradze bangs and roars himself into a state of explosive hyper-agitation. Moreover, he doesn’t leave much room for sanity in between.

In a rather cool program notable for the absence of a bona-fide romantic or classical sentiment, the impetuous Toradze repeatedly stretched lines out of shape at best, beyond endurance at worst. In his quest for independence, he took drastic liberties with the laws of coherence and continuity.

The evening began with an overwrought performance of Liszt’s Variations on Bach’s “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen.” The cantata title translates approximately as “Weeping, Lamenting, Sorrowing, Fearing.” Add whimpering and crashing.

In Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata, Toradze gave the macabre elements, the circuitous bravura flights and the whiz-bang finale their full due. And then some.

In Ravel’s “Miroirs,” he showed signs of being a dreamer and a colorist with much imagination--and not much discipline.

In three movements from Stravinsky’s “Petrushka,” which closed the program, he ended up pounding the piano to a frenzied pulp.

One would have thought that he left the poor, defenseless Steinway belly up, its legs twitching. Reliable sources report, however, that the dauntless virtuoso returned to play a couple of Scarlatti sonatas as encores.