Music Reviews : Pianist Alexander Slobodyanik at El Camino College

He’s rueful. He’s dour. Smiling to an audience hardly occurs to him. He’s also startlingly handsome in a tall, gaunt sort of way. And when he sits picture-perfect at the piano--as he did Friday at El Camino College--with his flaxen hair caught by the overhead light and his lanky frame fitting itself to the instrument, he defines poetic elegance.

Even if central casting had dreamed him up, Alexander Slobodyanik could not be better.

More to the point: The Soviet pianist’s image and art are one, as made evident in a program of familiar Chopin, Liszt, Mozart, Mendelssohn and Prokofiev.

No blandishments marred his musical vision. Neither did sentimentality have a place. Pathos was set forth simply and drama took on a dark intensity, whether brooding or fiery. Prettiness of tone and sensuality of touch--for their own sake--were banished.

Moreover, his prodigious technique could be put to whatever use he chose. In the Chopin group, for instance, Slobodyanik went straight to the harmonically difficult center, pulling out seldom heard voices.

He reined in the glitter commonly found in the “Fantaisie-Impromptu” and thoroughly Scriabinized the third and fourth ballades--the F-minor, for instance, came off as a darkly roaring epiphany.

That so hackneyed a piece as Liszt’s “La Campanella” could emerge sans showiness, reduced to a frenzied, nerve-wracked episode of mania, was a testament to the pianist’s individuality.

Conversely, he knew how to roll back. The sad little waltz in the midst of Mozart’s D-minor Fantasy was laid out with a placid perfection, eloquently bespeaking a world of sorrow.

There were no encores after Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata. But the audience seemed satisfied to be sent out on the gust of this acerbic, dense, aggressive music--played with brusque authority and the same breathless spontaneity noted before.