Music Reviews : Olivier Chassain in Guitar Recital at Caltech

It was not hard to understand how Olivier Chassain came by the grand prize of the Guitar Foundation of America’s 1988 International Guitar Competition, following his recital Saturday at Caltech. He has fingers, imagination and a real flair for the 20th-Century romantics who dominated his program.

The young Frenchman possesses a remarkably ripe, liquid sound, flattered by the mellow acoustic of Dabney Lounge. He employs it to poignant effect, in effortlessly lyrical statements.

Chassain began the second half of his California Harp, Lute and Guitar Assn. concert with an unhackneyed Barrios group. The music blossomed so naturally--a memory lapse in the “Mazurka Appassionata” notwithstanding--that the bravura passages seemed organic embellishments rather than obtrusive stunts.

The Five Pieces by Piazzolla proved logical program heirs to the moody grace of Barrios. Chassain left the interpretive edges a shade soft in “Acentuado” and “Compadre,” but caught all the swaying currents of pathos and irony elsewhere.

Poulenc’s brief Sarabande found Chassain suitably cool, and matched up well with the ebullience of Roussel’s “Segovia,” vividly expressed by Chassain.

The guitarist began this French set with the West Coast premiere of “Enfants Petrifies,” written for him by Alain Riou. A freely atonal, clearly structured exercise in color and the pertinent accretion of detail, the short tone poem made an intriguing calling card for a 60-year-old composer unknown here.

Although Chassain has featured Bach on his recordings, Baroque music was not his strongest suit Saturday. He lost most of whatever charms lie in a four-movement Fantasy by Telemann to murky, inarticulate textures and spongy lines.

He did prove eminently stylish in matters of ornamentation, however, and projected a much firmer sense of direction in Bach’s Lute Suite, BWV 995. There he delineated rhythms sharply, in a performance that acknowledged the dance roots of the music.

In encore, Chassain was back on solid ground, with a fluent traversal of Nikita Koshkin’s conservative “Guitar.’