Music Review : Chinese Virtuoso in Recital at Ambassador

It goes without saying that award-winning virtuosos are society’s special citizens. Not Xiang-Dong Kong, the Gold Medal Series debutant who played a recital Monday at Ambassador Auditorium: The Shanghai-born pianist began his career as an outlaw.

During the Cultural Revolution, when Western music was banned in the People’s Republic of China, his mother dampened the sounds of Kong’s practicing with cloth placed on the piano’s hammers. But whether that sense of doing the forbidden whetted his appetite or restricted his development awaits a later answer.

At this point, the 23-year-old musician shows the same eagerness to conquer every keyboard challenge as those who won only approval for their early efforts. And he certainly has the technique to do so. In the process, however, he often loses sight of the philosophic in favor of the literal.

Nowhere did he demonstrate this better than in Beethoven’s “Eroica” Variations. Overly fussy and self-conscious, his way suggested bravura pianism as the focus, rather than a search for the composer’s exalted message.

But in three Debussy preludes Kong found his metier--painting gorgeous pictures, daubing splashes of color, conjuring mists and Alhambra palaces. Similarly he was exultant in Liszt’s “Rhapsodie Espagnole,” grabbing up fistfuls of glittery octaves with furious gusto.

Given his limited interpretive scope, however, choosing Brahms’ intermezzos and Rachmaninoff’s B-flat-minor Sonata for the second half was disadvantageous; it produced a certain moony sameness, with no distinction between the pedaling requirements for a marvel of limpid melody (Brahms) and the full-blown melancholy of arpeggios (Rachmaninoff).