MUSIC REVIEW : After 13 Years Barred From West, Soviet Pianist Plays in Costa Mesa

One wants to cheer the return of Soviet pianist Vladimir Viardo to an active concert career in the West. Winner of the first prize in the Van Cliburn competition in 1973, Viardo played in the United States for two years, then Soviet officials refused him permission to return for the next 13.

But the results of a demanding recital Viardo gave Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa were decidedly mixed. Although never less than technically superb, Viardo rarely proved an artist of great warmth or deep insight.

Against a background of seven towering potted palms, Viardo played music by Schubert, Liszt, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff in a recital sponsored by the Philharmonic Society.

Without ceremony--or dimming of the house lights--Viardo made a quick entrance and launched into the first of Schubert’s Three Impromptus (Drei Koncertstucke, D. 946) with blurred, nervous attention. That impelled tension would recur in the last of the set.

The most magical moments--perhaps the only ones--were the extended pianissimo passages in the second impromptu, where he found elegance and poetry.

Elsewhere, Viardo demonstrated a tendency to pursue speed for its own virtuosic sake, although, to be sure, that can generate a certain kind of excitement. And although he often showed that he could be a wizard in varied attack and coloration, he also could be deficient in giving coherence to larger shapes or architecture.

Periodically too, he indulged in visual effects, heaving himself physically into the music by bouncing from the bench, drawing the end of an arabesque above the keyboard or clutching at the air.

In five of Liszt’s transcriptions of Schubert lieder, Viardo offered brilliant, disciplined pianism, perhaps all but exhausting the potential for personal expressivity.

One expected a special insight into Shostakovich’s wartime Second Piano Sonata. Yet here, after taking an intriguing lyrical approach to the opening, Viardo proved curiously disappointing.

He stretched the tempo of the slow movement threnody to dangerous limits, failed to unify the series of variations and arrived at the closing measures of the work without reveling in their ingenious recapitulation of earlier themes.

More surprisingly, Viardo began Rachmaninoff’s formidable “Variations on a Theme of Corelli” with a kind of moody musing that introduced distortions of phrasing that would recur later. It certainly did not have much emotional impact.

Viardo offered a single encore: “Fleeting Glances,” from Prokofiev’s “Visions Fugitives,” which he played with light, impish delicacy.