Music Reviews : Maisky Opens Southland Visit With Laguna Recital

Neither the most style-conscious nor the most immaculate of cellists, Mischa Maisky, who returns to Southern California this week for appearances with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (beginning Wednesday), nevertheless brings a strong musical personality to his playing.

Opening his week’s visit here Sunday night with a recital for the Laguna Beach Chamber Music Society, Maisky asserted that personality boldly. Like his mentors, Mstislav Rostropovich and the late Gregor Piatigorsky, Maisky makes music that is a personal statement first of all.

As a result, the second half of Maisky’s recital, in which he was assisted by pianist David Gross, proved the more engrossing portion of the performance in the unheated auditorium at Laguna Beach High School. Maisky and Gross seemed to relish all the challenges and facets in Schubert’s “Arpeggione” Sonata and in the Sonata by Debussy, clearly distinguishing their disparate rhetorics.

For once, the genuine lightness of mood and melancholy musical subtext of the “Arpeggione” were indicated without resort to grandstanding. The cellist and his solid pianistic partner gave every phrase its due, but overstated nothing. This reading therefore achieved great charm without great self-consciousness.

The hardy but still crushable Debussy opus also benefited from such a clarifying approach. And the teamwork between the two players again proved tight and single-minded.

Less involving and less satisfying, the pre-intermission performances emerged earthbound, if competent. Maisky’s playing of Bach’s Suite No. 3 for unaccompanied cello seemed to specialize in articulate statements not always connected to each other in thought, regular fragmenting of the longer line and contrasts sought for their own sake.

And Brahms’ familiar E-minor Sonata became more dutiful than passionate, the piano part in particular remaining in the emotional shadows.