PIANIST PETER ROESEL FINDS WAY TO WEST COAST

Before last Sunday, East German pianist Peter Roesel, a classmate of Gidon Kremer and Minoru Nojima at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow in the 1960s, had never played on the West Coast.

Now, as a result of a successful debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic--in the Beethoven piano-concerto cycle to be completed tonight and Saturday at the Wiltern Theatre--but more specifically, as Roesel says, “because I finally have United States management,” the 41-year-old musician will now be heard with greater regularity in this part of the world.

It’s not that Roesel is a late-bloomer. After his five-year training period in the Soviet Union, the Dresden-born pianist won a number of international competitions, and has worked steadily ever since.

For the last 10 years, he has conducted his career from a home base in Leipzig, where he continues as an artist-in-residence with the Gewandhaus Orchestra--making 15 solo appearances with the orchestra annually, as well as playing recitals and chamber-music performances under a unique arrangement Roesel says does not exist anywhere else in the world.

“It was just a lack of American representation,” is the way Roesel explains his late arrival on this coast. Now that he should be returning here, he would like, he says, to show off some of his other repertory.

“I think it is not a good thing to be a specialist,” he says, rattling off the names of composers other than Beethoven in whose works he has, well, specialized: Rachmaninoff, whose complete piano concertos he has recorded with his longtime colleague, conductor Kurt Sanderling (who leads the Beethoven concerts here); and Brahms, whose complete works for solo piano Roesel also plays, and has also recorded.

“Not to mention all the Romantic composers, plus many 20th-Century ones: Prokofiev, Bartok, Britten, Stravinsky . . . “ Roesel adds.

“Only the ultra-moderns, the ones who ask us to play from inside the piano--have I not played much, though I have given premieres.

“And next year, when the Gewandhaus goes on tour to China, Japan and the United States (including concerts at Ambassador Auditorium in May), we will include in our programs a new piano concerto by (the East German composer) Udo Zimmermann, which he is writing especially for me.”

On that seven-week, Asian-American tour, which also reaches the East Coast, Roesel’s other concerto will be Brahms’ First.

But the pianist’s eclecticism does not end with the standard repertory. In this year of the bicentenary of Carl Maria von Weber, Roesel reports, he has played the two, nearly forgotten piano concertos of that early Romantic, plus his unforgotten Konzertstueck, “at least 20 times, all over Germany.”