MUSIC REVIEW : Pianist Daniel Pollack in USC Recital

What distinguishes a stellar career with high visibility from one that just misses the klieg lights is not necessarily the talent quotient. Luck, determination, good press agentry, belief in oneself--these are often of equal importance.

Take Daniel Pollack, for example, a pianist of prodigious gifts. The same year Van Cliburn won first prize at the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition, this similarly tall, lanky American also came back a medalist.

Yet, today we do not find him traveling the A circuit. He returns regularly to the Soviet Union, where his stock remains high, and maintains annual international tours. Otherwise, he has made an academic home for himself--in the past two years on the East Coast at Yale and Juilliard, and since 1970 locally at USC.

It was on this campus, at Bovard Auditorium, that he gave a revelatory recital Sunday.

The large-scaled virtuosity--displayed in pliant, powerful fingers that unleashed torrents of sound that turned into feathery flurries of delicate detachment--was evident everywhere. Not for its own sake, however, but as a tool to achieving interpretive ends.

If one had to choose a single time-capsule item it would be Chopin’s D-flat Nocturne, here transformed into a marvel of novelistic dimension.

It started and ended with ineffable simplicity, an inwardness that spoke of the crushing drama to come. It developed into a heartbreak scenario, banishing all the usual effects of a perfumed garden, and brought us finally to a place of spent hope.

With Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C minor, Pollack also achieved a scope that belied the deceptively innocent theme, with the composer’s lofty sentiments given their due. And on Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata, he etched unsparing, contemporary anomie alternating with mighty, percussive bombast.

Among the wonders of Schumann’s Fantasy in C the pianist took daringly long rests at each reflective juncture, as though glimpsing some unknown abyss, and tempered the score’s brasher moments with a welcome degree of nobility. Finally, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6, tamed with uncommon sophistication, became here a demonic mystery.