MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : BOGAS AT EL CAMINO

Trained in California in the pianistic generation of John Browning, Marilyn Neeley, Daniel Pollack and David del Tredici, the San Francisco-based Roy Bogas has performed in the southern part of the state only infrequently in recent years.

Saturday, he returned in recital to Campus Theater at El Camino College in a one-sided program of works by Schumann, Rachmaninoff and Chopin, leaving an incomplete impression.

Bogas’ technique, facile and reliable, remains solid, if non-kaleidoscopic. He communicates with a tone of edgeless thrust and produces musical statements neat in their cogency. But he sometimes masks his own feelings, as well as those in the music he plays, with generalized, rather than personal, readings.

His approach to Schumann’s Fantasy, Opus 17, emerged like the first draft of a promising novel: engaging, non-specific and emotionally vacant. His manipulation of six Preludes by Rachmaninoff had the beginnings of authority, but no urgency, no welling-up of sentiment. Only in the once-maligned, once-overfamiliar C-sharp-minor Prelude, did color appear in the cheeks of these performances.

For all the many pianistic virtues in Bogas’ Chopin group--an etude, a nocturne and the E-major Scherzo, followed by an encore in the E-major Etude of Opus 10--he kept individual convictions to himself.