MUSIC REVIEW : Larrocha Returns to Ambassador

Alicia de Larrocha has long since proved the universality of her talent. Excepting contemporary music, all specialties are as one for the 67-year-old pianist.

Some specialties, though, are more equal than others. Tuesday she gave of her best, offering a compact, beautifully balanced program at Ambassador Auditorium devoted to Mozart and Granados.

Larrocha is currently recording the complete Mozart piano sonatas for RCA Victor, and given our bicentennial obsessions, Mozart was no surprise on the program. But her choices were fresh and revealing.

The Sonata in E-flat, K. 282, is a lovely, completely odd example of Mozart’s ability to shade quirkiness into nobility, and out again. Larrocha’s Mozart, thoroughly informed with taste and clarity, is not as proletarian as that of some partisans of period authenticity. She emphasized elegance as well as wit, objectivity as well as sentiment.

Sophistication doesn’t preclude vivacity, of course, and Larrocha attacked with clean, incisive strength and conviction, rhythmically sharply defined. She knew where each phrase was going, however abrupt the detours might be, and in her hands Mozart’s embellishments intensified the line rather than encumbered it.

Mozart’s last piano sonata, K. 576 in D, is a more public piece, often forthright in gesture and thoroughly extrovert in spirit. Larrocha stated that side of the work with sweep and clarion grandeur.

More important, she also delineated the complex inner workings--which turn the fanfares into philosophy--with precision and point.

In her Granados group--the first four “Goyescas” and “El pelele”--her concentration uncharacteristically flagged at times. In the rhythmic rigors of “El fandango del candil,” memory as well as fingers faltered at one point.

But the lapses only seemed to spark a greater rush of poetic intensity. Lesser musicians often find only salon superficiality in much of this music--Larrocha exposed expressive depths on a bedrock of harmonic and formal originality. The natural, communicative dialogue she delivered in “Quejas, o la maja y el ruisenor” and the dramatic vitality throughout the set, left little wonder about the suitability of this thoroughly pianistic music for the opera Granados later made of it.

In encore Larrocha turned to the spare folkishness of Mompou’s “Cancion y Danza,” the accumulation of tensions in “The Miller’s Dance” from Falla’s “Sombrero de tres picos,” and a fiery, moto perpetuo Sonata by Soler, all with a sense of stylish inevitability.