Music Review : Toradze at Gindi

The University of Judaism billed its spring fund-raiser Sunday as “Alexander Toradze Brings Russia to the Gindi.” The 37-year-old pianist defected from the Soviet Union in 1983, and his musically insightful tour was colored by an empathy for recent sorrows in his hometown Tbilisi, Georgia, which he remembered with the “Consolation” in B-flat, by Liszt.

In that, as in Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 109, Arno Babadjanian’s “Six Pictures,” and Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” Toradze proved himself a pianist of intelligent sensibility and easy power.

His palette produced absorbingly varied effects--from full, warm, hushed authority in the first notes of the Beethoven, to pointed, brittle foreboding in “The Gnome” of “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Unorthodox pedal effects further expanded his range of shades, emphasizing the spiritual qualities, echoes, and cathedral-bell overtones of Mussorgsky’s “Catacombs” and “Great Gate of Kiev.”

A sense of spirituality also pervaded a Chorale by the conservatively contemporary Babadjanian, which Toradze dedicated “to the devastated people of Armenia.” But the Chorale was the only sustained meditative interlude in the otherwise virtuosic set, to which Toradze brought seemingly effortless strength, stamina, and energy.