MUSIC REVIEW : Pogorelich Piano Recital at Ambassador

Keyboard gymnastics are nice, but in the great Romantic literature a musically more pertinent issue is definition of texture and color. That at least was a lesson emphatically taught by Ivo Pogorelich in his piano recital at Ambassador Auditorium on Tuesday evening.

Not, understand, that the young Yugoslav does not have a full virtuoso measure of speed and power. Whether in sudden gusts or sustained, implacable storms, he produced rafter-ringing sound at any speed, in single notes or massive blocks.

But it was his intense concentration and fierce control that separated Pogorelich’s playing of the Opus 79 Rhapsodies by Brahms, Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, and Chopin’s Opus 28 Preludes from the usual barn-storming standard. Pogorelich is a keyboard logician and sculptor, as well as a poet and stunt man.

Sharply etched clarity was immediately apparent in the opening of the B-minor Rhapsody, a piece that also established Pogorelich’s claim to the farthest reaches of the dynamic spectrum. It was the G-minor Rhapsody, however, in which his rigorous control of momentum took firm hold. He produced an astounding effect of barely contained energy, leading to a cumulative climax of much greater strength than anything more impetuous or stereotypically Romantic could have achieved.

Pogorelich’s mastery of texture served Chopin in good stead, and his sure sense of musical direction almost condensed the full 24 Preludes into one epic piece. At times, Pogorelich’s Chopin could sound calculated, but his logic was so irrefutable, it had an emotional fervor all its own.

In Liszt’s Sonata, Pogorelich clarified texture with almost brutal effectiveness, building a towering monument layer by layer. His view was expansive in scope, compressed in emotion and utterly commanding in execution.

At the most extreme moments throughout the program, snarling basses overwhelmed Pogorelich’s right hand. Whether it was a question of interpretive exaggeration or a piano pushed to its limits was not clear, but Pogorelich’s formidably regulated resources banished any thought that it might have been due to inadvertent manual imbalance.

From the widespread, savagely hacking coughing that assaulted portions of the Liszt, one might imagine that Pogorelich failed to reach his audience. Applause was vociferous, however, and ultimately elicited a lone encore from the obviously tired pianist--a highly Chopinesque account of Scriabin’s Poeme, Opus 32, No. 1.