Music Reviews : Pianist Dunn in Debut Recital at Japan America

Sometimes gifted amateurs rush in where experts fear to tread.

Blockbuster pieces tend to attract such innocents. Sunday, they certainly attracted Scott Dunn, a young pianist giving a debut recital at the Japan America Theatre in Little Tokyo.

Dunn took on not only the major hurdles inherent in Rachmaninoff’s nine, finger-busting “Etudes-Tableaux,” Opus 39, for his program closer, he also began his program with Schubert’s “Moments Musicaux,” Opus 94, followed them with a Chopin ballade and included a 20th-Century work of tremendous difficulty in his program.

And, for the most part, he succeeded in making all these notes into apprehendable music. Gifted, indeed.

The addition of professional experience is what makes talent blossom; Dunn may be in a position to get such experience as word of his accomplishment spreads. On Sunday afternoon, weaknesses of articulation, pacing and stamina surfaced regularly in his exigent agenda; finally, in the penultimate etude, the pianist showed signs of fatigue. But not before he had displayed an abundance of technique and musicality.

The mechanical and structural demands in the Rachmaninoff pieces he met head-on, usually delivering their unwritten scenarios convincingly. And he showed genuine rapport with Schubertian and Chopinesque ideals, laying out the six “Moments Musicaux” with simplicity and directness most of the time, and bringing to the F-major Ballade a clear sense of emotional wholeness.

At mid-program, Dunn again shared with a rapt audience Leonard Rosenman’s “Theme and Elaborations” (1951), a fascinating, idiomatic and communicative work the pianist played on a Lo Cal Composers program in November.

Though he follows another profession--he practices ophthalmology in the San Fernando Valley, and this event benefited Dr. Dunn’s own Friends of Vision Foundation--the 36-year-old musician from the Midwest, who took a prize in the 1975 Kosciuszko Foundation Chopin Competition in New York, was clearly born to play the piano. What he does about it next is his problem.