Music Reviews : Murray Perahia Returns for Recital at Music Center

Like the many great pianists of the past, the few great pianists of the present seem to expand their horizons even as they hone their specialties. In their careers, versatility is neither a sin nor a misstep, but only the natural result of musical breadth.

Murray Perahia, who will be 42 in two weeks, is a pianist with few peers, and certainly the most versatile type of musician. In the decade and a half he has been visiting here, his concerto appearances have netted memorable, even definitive, performances. And his recitals continue to provoke interest, fascination and admiration.

At the latest of these, Wednesday night in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center, Perahia may not have lit as many fires among his listeners as at some other of his solo performances, yet he maintained his own standard nonetheless.

The program cut across some of the repertory areas we have come to think of Perahia territory, Beethoven and Schumann in particular. But it also offered effortless, elegant and seamless playing of four of Rachmaninoff’s “Etudes Tableaux” and, to close, an aristocratic, if not incendiary, Liszt group.

No-nonsense, urgent and Classically stylish Beethoven began this performance. Perahia’s clean and cogent playing of the 32 Variations in C minor probed the violence and lyricism therein, but within strict dynamic boundaries. Even more circumspect, his unself-consciously virtuosic reading of the C-major Sonata of Opus 2 put that irrepressible work in its exact historic niche.

The still-youthful American musician remains a pristine interpreter of the works of Robert Schumann. His latest installment in an ongoing survey of the composer’s output, the early “Faschings-schwank aus Wien,” netted more heat, as well as more light, than he had achieved in his standoffish playing of the Rachmaninoff pieces earlier.

Gorgeous and controlled sound characterized Perahia’s way with Liszt’s “Consolation” No. 3. And the 12th Hungarian Rhapsody concluded the recital proper in a blaze of display.

For his single encore, Perahia offered Schubert’s Impromptu in A-flat, Opus 90, No. 4.