Music Reviews : Flutist Robison at Bing Theater

Unlike certain superstar flutists, Paula Robison isn’t content to read halfheartedly through Baroque sonatas at her recitals these days. Instead, she took on a tough program at the Bing Theater of the County Museum of Art Wednesday night, with the first half weighted toward American composers--often young ones--and the second anchored in France.

Moreover, Robison pulled it off with style and flair, as well as formidable technique. She is compulsively theatrical, constantly in motion, aiming her instrument at several, often unorthodox angles, at times bearing down with startling aggression. But she also maintained sensitive balances with her pianist, Timothy Hester, who provided assertive, clearly etched, even driving accompaniments.

Lowell Liebermann’s Sonata gave Robison a pretty thorough opening workout, with its piercing bursts of agitation in the opening Lento movement and nervous, hard-charging finale. Likewise, Robert Beaser’s sprawling Variations was an earnest, youthful tour de force, obsessed with the battle between tonality and atonality.

Yet ultimately, there were more purely musical rewards to be found in two brief interludes totaling five minutes between them--Roy Harris’ rock-solid “Lyric Study” and Samuel Barber’s warm-hearted Canzone.

Just as the second half was to begin, Robison playfully announced that in accordance with the myth of Pan, she was going to play Debussy’s solo flute standard, “Syrinx,” in the dark. Alas, the brightly illuminated Exit signs in the hall spoiled that illusion, but she still turned in an intense, dramatic performance of the brief solo.

Robison then relaxed into a mode of straight-forward lyrical expression in four Faure songs that she adapted for the flute, followed by a display of dazzlingly rapid tonguing and naive charm in Cecile Chaminade’s Concertino. Finally, while gliding around the stage and facing her pianist, Robison turned Zez Confrey’s “Dizzy Fingers” into a madcap dialogue whose antithesis was the disarmingly direct simplicity of MacDowell’s “To a Wild Rose.”