Music Reviews : Perry in Recital

Antoinette Perry brought exceptional artistry as percussionist to her Tuesday night recital in the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at USC.

Acknowledging pianist Perry thus merely underscores the perspective of her challenging program. In music of Schoenberg, Bartok, Shostakovich, George Crumb and Donald Keats, Perry exploited those possibilities of the piano that graphically emphasize its historic assignation to the percussion family of instruments.

And she did so with the same intense care and respect that she has brought to Mozart and Beethoven.

Perry served up a meticulously crafted reading of Crumb’s “Little Suite for Christmas, AD 1979,” that could have passed for improvisation. Percussive elements never degenerated into bombast. She got up and down with disarming grace to strike, pluck and play glissandos on the strings inside the piano, and gave discreet weight to echoes of Faure and Debussy.

Her skillfully lathed plan for three of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues, Opus 87, ended much better than it began.

Ultimately these, and especially her super-charged performance of Bartok’s 1926 Sonata, were distinguished by Perry’s absolute rhythmic security, uncommonly adroit pedaling (every harmony registered clearly as it flashed by), her elegiac way with stark, bare-bones lyricism, and her ability to sustain an allegro with the momentum of a roaring freight train.