MUSIC REVIEWS : Pianist Rodriguez Scores in Short Order : His recital at Segerstrom Hall is a slam-bang affair but shows why he is considered a shining light of the music world.

Santiago Rodriguez’s recital in Segerstrom Hall Saturday night was a wham-bam affair: A Mozart sonata, a Chopin group, music by Spanish and Argentine composers, two brief encores and the audience put out on the street by 9:40 p.m. Those who came to savor had to do it on the way home.

Still, it was a unique and exciting event.

Again, the 39-year-old Cuban-born pianist proved himself one of the shining lights of his generation, a genuine poet/virtuoso who appeals as much to a populist audience as to connoisseurs. Rodriguez seems to have it all: technique, personality, strong musical opinions and heart.

His short recital was complete as far as it went; the program lacked only a contemporary zing, something representative of our times.

It began with exquisite Mozart, a purling, tightly controlled, stylish but freely lyric and gorgeously colored performance of the Sonata in C, K. 330.

The concert crested on the beautifully paced Chopin group consisting of the G-minor Ballade, the Nocturnes in C minor and C-sharp minor (the last, Opus Posthumous) and the C-sharp-minor Scherzo, all wondrously articulated, technically liberated, handsomely sung-out. As noted, Rodriguez does have the common touch and connects humanly with his audiences, even those that, like this one, cough a lot.

One has to resort to making lists of past pianists to describe Rodriguez’s touching playing of important music by Falla, Soler and Ginastera.

The kind of sensitivity he projected in two of Falla’s “Cuatro Piezas Espanolas,” the sort of passionate restraint he displayed in Soler’s most famous D-minor Fandango, the subtleties of touch and reservoirs of power he brought to bear in Ginastera’s Three Argentinean Dances--these recalled the unforgettable advocacy of great music of Spain and the Americas at one time associated with Gieseking, with Novaes, with the Iturbis . . .

In his two encores (the audience wanted more), Rodriguez continued the Hispanic mood.

First was a haunting lullaby by the Argentine composer Joaquin Ruvo which found the pianist playing more softly than he had all evening. Then came Ernesto Lecuona’s atmospheric “Gitanerias.”