MUSIC : For Pianist, Rachmaninoff Strikes a Personal Note

Pianist John Browning usually hears the ghost of Rachmaninoff when he plays the composer’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” which he’ll do again Saturday, when he’ll appear with the Orange County Symphony of Garden Grove.

“All of us pianists can hear in our ear the so-called Rachmaninoff tradition, the way he played it,” Browning, 57, said in a recent phone interview from his home in New York. “He was, in many ways, the most extraordinary pianist of anybody’s memory. There was a quality in the playing that nobody could even touch, not even Horowitz.”

Still, musicians shouldn’t be frightened away, Browning said.

“We all know we can’t do it the way he did,” he said. “This piece is a very tightly knit, virtuosic piece. I think it can be played in a variety of ways. You find out what works best for yourself.”

Browning has been finding out what works best for himself since he began playing in public at the age of 10--also the same year Rachmaninoff died. Born in 1933 in Denver, Browning grew up in a musical family. His father was a professional violinist, his mother an accomplished pianist.

He made his debut in Mozart’s “Coronation” Concerto, and went on to became a scholarship pupil of the legendary teacher Rosina Lhevinne at the Juilliard School of Music in New York.

Prizes and awards followed quickly. He was a winner of the Steinway Centennial Award in 1954, the Leventritt Award in 1955 and came in second to Vladimir Ashkenazy in the Queen Elizabeth International Competition in 1956. But he has mixed feelings about competitions.

“I’ve been on both sides,” said Browning, who also has served on juries. “The results are never as clear-cut as people would like to think. It’s much more difficult for juries to make decisions than people realize.”

Browning actually played the Paganini Variations when he made his debut with the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos in 1956. “So it is a piece I’ve played pretty much all of my professional life,” he said.

One person in the audience happened to be composer Samuel Barber, who “liked my playing and became interested in me,” Browning said. “I played a good deal for him, and we became friends.”

In fact, Barber picked Browning to play the world premiere of his Piano Concerto with the Boston Symphony under Erich Leinsdorf in 1962. Browning estimates that he has played the work more than 500 times.

“It’s wonderful to be identified so closely with a work that is so wonderful and successful,” Browning said.

But it was tough. Barber hadn’t even started the last movement two weeks before the premiere.

“We were in constant communication on it, page by page,” Browning said. “So the interpretation was worked out very much with him. He was not the least bit distant. He was warm and communicative all the way through, right up to the very premiere.

“Barber had been a pianist himself, as well as a singer and so knew what was possible.” Still, he said, “there were little places we argued at. . . . Maybe this (passage) at the tempo was a little difficult. So we took it to Mr. Horowitz, who said, ‘Yes, indeed, it is difficult and has to be simplified.’ ”

Recently, Browning made his second recording of the work, this one with Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony.

“If I compare that with the recording I made with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra in 1964,” Browning said, “it’s very different. It’s difficult to say exactly how. It just sounds more lyric. There is a broader line, a longer line, a little more courage to take time. . . .

“We all change,” he added. “There is no question about that. It isn’t always that we try to change. It’s just that years and years of probing and thinking and feeling differently cause a change in the way you look at music.”

Browning’s concert will mark his first appearance with the Orange County Symphony of Garden Grove (formerly the Garden Grove Symphony). He said that he will have only two rehearsals with the orchestra but is not bothered by that.

“We very seldom, even in the old days, got more than two rehearsals,” he said. “It will work out. If they are ready and I’m ready, it should be enough.”

* John Browning will be piano soloist with the Orange County Symphony of Garden Grove in Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” on Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Don Wash Auditorium, 11271 Stanford Ave., Garden Grove. Music director Edward Peterson also will conduct Kodaly’s “Dances of Galanta” and Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9. Tickets: $10 to $25. Information: (714) 534-1103.

OUT OF THE WOODS: Corporate and private donations topping $50,000 have rescued the Orange County Symphony of Garden Grove, at least temporarily. Orchestra management announced last month that the orchestra needed $30,000 by April 30 to hold Saturday’s concert as scheduled. The money was part of a $121,000 accumulated debt dating to 1985. “We are overcoming the immediate crisis,” orchestra manager Yaakov Dvir-Djerassi said Tuesday. “We are catching up.” Dvir-Djerassi said that the orchestra also has applied for $30,000 from the city of Garden Grove and that he expects an answer by May 7.

OPERA SUMMER: The Guild Alliance of Opera Pacific will offer summer tours to opera festivals in Santa Fe, N.M., Seattle, San Francisco and Europe.

The Santa Fe tour, July 24-31, will include Puccini’s “La Fanciulla del West,” Verdi’s “La Traviata,” the world premiere of Wolfgang Rihm’s “Oedipus Rex,” Mozart’s “Le Nozze de Figaro” and Strauss’ “Die Schweisgame Frau.”

The Seattle tour, Aug. 10-17, will include Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen.” Dates and repertory of the San Francisco and Europe tours will be announced. Information: (714) 544-7027 or (714) 546-7372.