MUSIC REVIEW : Pianist Horacio Gutierrez in Recital at Chandler Pavilion

Horacio Gutierrez’s reputation as a pianist--and it is a considerable one--has to date been based largely on bravura playing. He is a veteran of countless concerto wars, in which he has triumphed with almost every major orchestra around the world.

Whether he has now renounced that style and put it all behind him, or whether he is simply indulging in a temporary change of pace remains to be seen. At his recital in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Monday night he was the antithesis of a bravura pianist. He concentrated on delicacy, poetry, restraint and subtlety. There was not one rousing fortissimo during the entire evening.

That is not to imply that there was any shortage of technique. Gutierrez has miraculous fingers, with which he explored the outermost range of the piano’s mesmeric effects. To a piano specialist it was an astonishing exhibition; to the seeker of easy entertainment it could have been frustrating, not to say dull.

It was the sort of playing that can elevate Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen, Albeniz or others of the kind to lofty heights. It always charmed the ear and the nuance scale was like a double rainbow over the desert. To that extent it was expressive, but it rarely touched emotional depths. Gutierrez’s playing became an art of suggestion, shorn of rhetoric and drama.

Compressed into a classical frame, that was quite the right thing for Beethoven’s Sonata in D, Opus 10, No. 3. It lent itself perfectly to elegant phrasing, crisp passage work, the long sustained legato of the largo, the airy grace of the little minuet-scherzo, and solved the often puzzling problem of the finale.

But it was not a manner that did enough for the robust sentiment of Schumann’s “Davidsbundlertanze.” Everything was there, but small-scaled and insufficiently projected. Gutierrez’s was polite Schumann, and that can be a contradiction.

Rather than settle for the frenzied activity of Prokofiev’s Sixth or Seventh sonatas, Gutierrez chose the more recondite and possibly more mature attitudes of the Sonata No. 8. The first movement is a meandering bore, and the pianist’s gingerly treatment of it did not help its case. He found palpable charm in the quasi-minuet of the second movement, marked andante sognando , and he suddenly struck flame in the controlled bravura of the finale.

The audience became rapturous for the first time during the evening, but the pianist did not cater to its taste. Instead, he settled for one dreamy encore, Liszt’s “Sonetto 104 del Petrarca.”