PIANIST MURRAY PERAHIA PLAYS CHOPIN BALLADES

Possibly because he doesn’t look heroic, some listeners, including even longtime observers, tend to think of Murray Perahia as a pianist of small-scale, if exquisite, performances, a miniaturist as well as a Mozartean, and a musician outside the mainstream.

The still-young American pianist--he’ll be 40 next month--certainly lives up to some of the above descriptions.

The claim that he is not heroic, however--that just ain’t so, probably never was so and those of us guilty of such thinking can now desist from it. As Perahia proved, once and for all in the Pavilion of the Music Center Sunday night, his artistic achievements, pianistic resources and ability to sustain and project musical thought across wide spaces place him unquestionably on a high plateau. He is, as many have said, among the elite.

His program by itself, though demanding, needn’t have confirmed his place. It offered Mozart’s D-minor Fantasy, K. 397,and D-major Sonata, K. 576, Beethoven’s E-flat Sonata, Opus 31, No. 3, and the four Ballades of Chopin. But his aristocratic approach, the elegance and directness of his pianistic delivery, and the complete communication he achieves with his listeners made this agenda fairly vibrate with meaning.

No waffling or prissiness marks Perahia’s Mozart; exterior elements like handsome sound and logical phrasing seem only offshoots of concentrated musical thinking; the thinking dominates.

Similarly, the abundant joys in his playing of the middle-period E-flat Beethoven Sonata came from the pianist’s irrepressible, and physical, responses to the witticisms and pranks in the score, and were expressed without self-censoring. Perahia’s fun here had to be contagious; one wanted not only to laugh out loud, but to cheer the pianist for causing the mirth.

There are certainly other, more spontaneous, approaches to the four Ballades than Perahia’s, but few more polished, better thought through or more impassioned. In his concept, each of these works possesses a separate and distinct personality, and each moves inevitably from opening to conclusion. As he played them on Sunday, Perahia’s view of the Ballades emerged with utter conviction, achieving a grandeur of statement that became irresistible.

At the end, Impromptus were forthcoming as encores, the first, in E-flat, by Schubert, the second, in G-flat, by Chopin.