Music Reviews : Neil Rutman at USC

Not every piano sweepstakes contender makes his way to the glittery A-circuit of the winners’ circuit--some, like Neil Rutman, do nicely at a sub-stratum.

At his recital Monday night in Hancock Auditorium at USC, the San Francisco native demonstrated the partial right stuff for either track: a powerful technique and the concentration for delivering whiz-bang accounts of big showpieces.

Honoring Donald Crockett of the USC School of Music faculty, Rutman played that composer’s “Pilgrimage,” a lively piece animated by staccato chords warring with dense passagework, percussion with silence. The pianist did much to ensure its identity as a mildly frantic but nonetheless agreeable soundscape.

He also nodded to the USC “Copland at 90” Festival, playing “Night Thoughts,” a study the venerable composer wrote for the 1973 Van Cliburn Competition. Somber yet quirky, it has a characteristic spareness that proved a tonic for the contestant at hand.

Less persuasive was his way with an opening group by Jean-Phillipe Rameau. Here he created a swath of sound, rather than note-by-note clarity, pedaling heavily on an instrument already unsuited to Baroque niceties.

Giving full vent to this tendency in the following B-minor Sonata of Liszt, Rutman mercilessly pounded what was now a tubby, clangorous piano to a nearly painful din. But he drove the score’s melodramatic points home and lavished his tender all on the dreamy passages, though without much sensuality.

Matters improved with Clara Schumann’s Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, which favored controlled, rather than poetic, introspection and pro forma, rather than wild, exuberance.

In Ravel’s “La Valse,” one heard the whole gamut of Rutman’s musical persona: a forceful, excited immersion into the physicality of the demands, but a self-conscious articulation that stopped him from delivering the score all of a piece.