MUSIC REVIEW : Thibaudet Plays Brahms, Ravel

In an age when too many young musicians who are prodigally gifted at the keyboard rely upon personal eccentricity or pianistic perversity to attract attention, Jean-Yves Thibaudet is a beacon of musical and artistic integrity.

Not that the 26-year-old French pianist can’t knock your socks off. Sunday night at Royce Hall, UCLA, he played a formidable program of Brahms and Ravel with staggering virtuosity and self-effacing composure, avoiding tiresome exercises in showmanship and letting the music speak for itself.

Opening with three Ravel miniatures--”Menuet antique” and homages to Borodin and Chabrier--Thibaudet defined the meaning of refined sensitivity in the limpid, near-Mozartean grace with which he executed them.

The technical rigors of “Gaspard de la Nuit” only encouraged even greater fluidity, expressiveness, imaginative coloration (produced in part by brilliant pedaling) and stirring bravura. “Ondine” was one long, superbly gauged crescendo-decrescendo arch, the repeated B-flat of “Le Gibet” was tolled with hauntingly eloquent variety, and the easy power lavished on “Scarbo” never came close to the banging others find inescapable there.

The pianist dispatched both books of Brahms’ “Paganini” Variations with commanding authority and total control of their extravagant rhetoric and vast range of fiendish obstacles, honoring equally the daredevil Lisztian elements and the lyricism a la Schumann.

In the four Opus 119 Piano Pieces, Thibaudet ran the gamut from feathery but always substantial elegance to massive, full-toned sonority that was never labored. He even uncovered a bit of unexpected humor in the crisp chords of the E-flat Rhapsody.

Encores: two great Chopin Etudes--Opus 25, No. 11, and Opus 10, No. 12--played with indefatigable, breathtaking elan, and an affecting reading of Debussy’s “Clair de lune.”