Music Reviews : Ohlsson’s Chopin at Ambassador

Quirky, idiosyncratic and inconsistently stylish, Garrick Ohlsson’s Chopin playing continues to fascinate, more than two decades after the American pianist of Swedish-Italian heritage first burst upon the international scene by winning the 1970 Chopin Competition in Warsaw.

At his latest Ambassador Auditorium recital Thursday night, Ohlsson, now 42 and still a charismatic keyboard performer, shared his present feelings about the Polish composer.

As before, those feelings remain individual, perhaps even unique.

At his best, Ohlsson applies his penchant for willful self-expression lightly, stressing an accent here, stretching a tempo rubato there. At his most self-indulgent, he engages in strange stoppings-and-goings, lengthy ritards, prestissimo rushings--mannerisms that call attention to the performer’s personality, not to the composer’s. He also continues to produce inconsistent, but often metallic, sounds on the Bosendorfer piano he plays.

Even so, and while looking askance at a number of places in this program where his tempos clearly blurred Chopin’s expressiveness, one must admire Ohlsson’s eternal quest for new ways to articulate the composer’s style. Genuine individuality has become such a rarity in an era of cookie-cutter pianistic personalities that even those who border on the bizarre must be cherished.

The Thursday program offered some cherishable moments.

In Ohlsson’s program-closing offering of the Preludes, Opus 28, one had to sit up and take notice of his playing of those in A, F-sharp, A-flat and E-flat (all in major mode), wherein the tall pianist alternately caressed the long musical line and over-articulated key phrases. Alas, most of the minor-mode preludes did not escape over-interpretation.

The B-flat-minor Sonata became mostly straightforward in the two central movements, and, as a result, seemed to reflect the composer’s intentions.

Yet the outer movements received only perfunctory treatment. In the opening, Ohlsson’s failure to take the repeat of the exposition seriously undermined the structure; in the finale, his choice of mezzo-forte as the prevailing dynamic medium contradicted one’s lifelong perception of the function of that movement as a ghostly coda to the Funeral March.

The program proper began with the B-minor Scherzo and the two Nocturnes of Opus 27. At the end of the evening, Ohlsson played three encores: Chopin’s G-minor Ballade; the Finale from the First Sonata by Carl Maria von Weber; and the Etude, Opus 42, No. 3, by Scriabin.