Early Keyboards Are His Forte : Music: Igor Kipnis, known for his revival of the harpsichord and fortepiano, will give a recital at a Mozart tribute in Fullerton Sunday.

It has a narrow dynamic range, a clinking timbre, and to many would-be listeners, an arcane, fusty aura. But to Igor Kipnis, the 400-year-old harpsichord can still make vibrant music for audiences of today.

Kipnis, a 61-year-old professorial type who’s been touring, lecturing and extolling the virtues of the keyboard instrument for three decades, regularly spices programs of the venerables with crossover selections, making him perhaps the only harpsichord player ever to pluck out Brubeck or Ellington on an instrument whose heyday was the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries.

“I’ve always played as much repertoire on it as you possibly can,” says Kipnis, who will play an all-Mozart program in Fullerton on Sunday. “So many people think of the instrument as belonging entirely to an ‘attic’ repertoire. It doesn’t only have to play the better-known harpsichord composers--Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, Rameau and Couperin. I take it all the way to the end of the 18th Century, and then all kinds of 20th-Century composers have written for it as a solo, chamber or coloristic instrument with orchestra.”

Thirty years ago, when he first lit out for the wide open spaces to win converts, Kipnis carried his red-lacquered Rutkowski and Robinette harpsichord in a Chevrolet Sportvan. It is one measure of the harpsichord’s increasing popularity that he is now able to arrange surrogate instruments of more or less satisfactory quality just about anywhere along his performance trail.

“I have to play as though I am perfectly comfortable on this unknown instrument even though it is the equivalent of driving a car in the Indianapolis 500--and maybe I don’t remember where the brake is.”

Kipnis is minding two anniversaries this year--the bicentenary of Mozart’s death, which has increased demand for his Mozart program (actually played on fortepiano, the forerunner of the piano), and the centenary of the birth of his father, the great Metropolitan Opera basso Alexander Kipnis.

As part of a cluster of appearances in the Los Angeles area this week, he will present an illustrated lecture on his father to the Wagner Society today (he just signed a contract to co-write a biography of him), teach master classes in San Diego on Monday and Tuesday and play a harpsichord recital for the Los Angeles Bach Festival on Friday, in addition to the Fullerton program Sunday.

To accompany his prolific recording output--about 70 by his count--he has received six Grammy nominations, three Record of the Year awards from Stereo Review, the 1969 Deutsche Schallplatten Prize and numerous other accolades.

And in an economy that has seen concert promoters spout Cassandralike pronouncements about the death of the recital as an entertainment form, Kipnis continues to regale audiences with his one-man programs--facile, no-nonsense harpsichord playing laced with humor, mild irreverence and solid information. Because he intersperses his playing with commentary, there’s no need for program notes.

“Audiences somehow think that to be interesting, you have to have a whole lot of bodies on the stage. I spend a good bit of my time trying to make the single-performer show anything but a crashing bore,” he asserts.

“That’s all part of trying to make the concert more informal and to get rid of the pedestal. I’m not pedestal-minded.”

Growing up the son of a great opera basso probably contributed to Kipnis’ attitude, as, no doubt, did playing childhood games under the piano of his maternal grandfather in Chicago. That was Heniot Levy, a student of composer Max Bruch who turned to teaching because of the pressing need to feed his family.

In such a family background, it was never stated outright but always understood that music, with its financial uncertainties, was not to be Igor Kipnis’ career. Kipnis’ Harvard degree is not in music but in social relations. After stints as a radio announcer, music reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune and general factotum at various record companies, Kipnis decided to commit himself to the harpsichord in 1959. He recalls his father’s disbelief that he was going to make a career “on an ancient relic.”

Kipnis, who was born in Berlin, was carried from one operatic capital to another before his parents settled in New York City in 1940. His father sang in Germany as late as 1938, never fearing for his safety because of his great popularity there and because he had American citizenship.

“One of the fascinating things that came up while I researched the biography,” says Kipnis fils, “is that in 1933, father was in Bayreuth performing at the festival. He was invited by the Wagner family to have dinner; the other guest was to be Adolf Hitler. He turned the invitation down, saying he was otherwise occupied.”

Igor Kipnis will play an all-Mozart program on the fortepiano Sunday at 3:30 p.m. at the Sunny Hills High School Performing Arts Center, 1801 Warburton Way, Fullerton. Sponsored by the Fullerton Friends of Music, the City of Fullerton, and Sunny Hills High School. Admission: free. Information: (714) 525-9504.