MUSIC REVIEW : Pianist’s Reserve Puts Damper on an Otherwise Fluent Program

Five years ago, the local gentry sponsored David Korevaar in a Sherwood Auditorium recital to bankroll the then 21-year-old pianist’s New York City debut. Saturday night, the former La Jolla pianist returned to Sherwood--debuts and competition laurels behind him--to perform in the La Jolla Chamber Music Society’s chamber music series.

His program revealed a strong keyboard technique, a modicum of maturity and a penchant for offbeat programming. A clear-cut musical profile, however, an identity that will distinguish Korevaar from the plethora of other budding virtuosos, did not emerge from his serious music-making Saturday night.

Korevaar plunged through Brahms’ challenging “Variations on a Theme of Paganini,” Op. 35, with nary a misstep. He handled the cascading octaves and tricky cross-hand maneuvers with aplomb and deftly outlined the signature Paganini “Caprice” theme each time it appeared. But he was coolly objective to the point of being disengaged, wearing the piece like a mask, rather like his opaque half-smile that greeted the audience before and after each piece.

Fortunately, Korevaar warmed to his audience in the program’s second half, which opened with the pianist’s own Second Sonata (1985) and Ernst von Dohnanyi’s “Ruralia Hungarica.” The gregarious spirit of Dohnanyi’s suite, which is based on Hungarian folk music, managed to coax Korevaar out of his shell. He spoke through the work’s glossy technical tricks and became downright confessional in its introspective movements.

In spite of a piano that had sounded brash and unforgiving on the first half, Korevaar suddenly found a spectrum of mellow timbres for his own sonata. He made the work inviting, even though its brooding idee fixe could have been as unfriendly as his cool Brahms exercises. In stylistic terms, the single-movement sonata’s rhapsodic, declamatory idiom called to mind the early piano works of Leos Janacek.

Korevaar opened his recital with a well-manned, decidely unfussy Mozart Sonata in F Major, K. 332. Although he had the familiar work in his fleet fingers, his emotional commitment to Mozart’s sonata was guarded, to say the least. His brittle timbre combined with a tendency to overplay the sforzando accents made this listener believe Korevaar would have been happier tackling one of Beethoven’s more aggressive sonatas.