Music Reviews : Pianist Lucchesini Returns to Ambassador Auditorium

Quick, what are the three most famous piano pieces in the key of D-flat? Obviously: the “Minute” Waltz, the Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody and “Clair de Lune.”

After a very serious program marking his second local recital appearance, young Andrea Lucchesini on Wednesday night at Ambassador Auditorium offered two of those three chestnuts as his encores. He didn’t play the “Minute” Waltz, but he gave full value to Liszt’s familiar Rhapsody and Debussy’s once-ubiquitous evocation of moonlight.

In this context--an agenda beginning with Brahms’ F-minor Sonata, ending with Schumann’s “Carnaval,” tied together with three Chopin impromptus--such a descent into musical populism could be justified. The 24-year-old Italian pianist had already proved his seriousness--as well as his inconsistency. At the end of the evening, he had some fun.

As did his audience. The Liszt piece, with those wrist-challenging repeated notes, bushels of fast octave-passages and knotty, hard-to-articulate chords, caused Lucchesini no sweat. With good humor and a genuine sense of style, he sailed through. And “Clair de Lune,” though no model of layered soft-playing, nevertheless exerted its legato charms seductively.

The second half of the printed program also revealed the Italian musician an admirable Romantic. He stayed close to the keys, and to the spirit of Chopin, in the A-flat, F-sharp and G-flat Impromptus, which touched the listener through the pianist’s unforced spontaneity.

He brought the same sense of on-the-spot invention, combined with myriad felicitous and pertinent details, to Schumann’s colorful canvas. Indeed, this familiar masterwork has seldom received such exhaustive probing. Young Lucchesini clearly has a mind as sharp as his technical skills.

Yet he failed to show any finished integration of brain and fingers in his mostly uneventful run-through of Brahms’ great Opus 5 Sonata, which opened the program. Here, the actual piano-playing emerged immaculate and clarified. But the huge work’s musical content came out half-baked, incomplete and unapprehended. Intensity and compulsion, the core of Brahms’ emotional profile, never made an appearance; consequently, the sonata remained unrevealed.