Music Reviews : Pianist Barry Douglas in Ambassador Recital

Barry Douglas certainly chose a revealing program for his Ambassador Auditorium recital Sunday, one exposing both temperment and technique.

On the latter count there were no surprises. The prize-winning Irish pianist has been with us frequently in recent seasons, in both recital and concerto appearances, indoors and at Hollywood Bowl, and his prodigious mechanical abilities are well-known and much respected.

Little in his previous efforts, however, suggested how he might integrate an intriguing and formidable Prokofiev-Beethoven-Webern-Liszt agenda. There were moments when his inspiration seemed too internalized for public communication, but most of the program he presented with compelling intensity.

And a characterful, individual program it was. Who else would follow Webern’s Opus 27 Variations with Liszt’s B-minor Sonata? Such a pairing would seem to carry contrast to the point of mutually exclusive contrariness.

Douglas made it work, discovering a measure of Chopinesque poignance in the Webern and maintaining an incisive edge to Liszt’s rhetoric. He did allow the Sonata’s central grandiloquence to disintegrate into unfocused phraselets, however, which he revived with a tight, insistent fugue.

Something similar beset Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata, the Andante variations breaking up into overly manicured bits. Few make the moto perpetuo mania of the finale as articulate as Douglas did, and he delivered a fully realized scenario of thought and passion in the opening movement.

The paradoxical sort of forceful introspection that Douglas applied throughout constricted the three excerpts from Prokofiev’s “Cinderella” with which he launched the matinee. Only in the sardonic waltz did this music really breathe. His suffocating interpretation also proved untidy.

In encore, Douglas offered a dazzlingly fleet and precise account of Liszt’s “Rigoletto” paraphrase.