Music Reviews : Veteran Pianist Cherkassky Makes Music Center Debut

Bad timing is not part of Shura Cherkassky’s arsenal of artistic resources, yet the 80-year-old pianist, who seems to have outlived most of his great--and some not-so-great--contemporaries, made a very belated debut in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center, Tuesday night.

What took him so long? The quick and easy answer is: Changing tastes. Sixty and 70 years ago, around the time young Cherkassky--Russian-born, Curtis-trained--was first appearing in recital, pianists were supposed to be individuals. Their programs reflected personal tastes, as did their keyboard performances. Artistic conformity was not the ideal. Standard musical readings simply did not exist; everyone had his or her own.

Today, individuality on the recital platform, for several decades out of style, is making a comeback. Witness the general acclaim given pianists as unlike as Krystian Zimerman, Ivo Pogorelich and Yevgeny Kissin in recent years.

In the meantime, Cherkassky, who has often been called a throwback, plays pretty much as he always did (reportedly, that is; we have been hearing him, in this, happy-dividend part of his career, for little more than a decade): With tremendous artistic conviction, stunning technical accomplishment, and a sometimes breathtaking use of tempo rubato.

After several visits to Ambassador Auditorium in the 1980s, Cherkassky arrived at the Pavilion--in the city where, according to some of his friends, he nearly starved to death (for lack of engagements) in the early 1940s, before his remarkable, postwar European success-- this week.

His program again set conventional minds to overworking; his playing lived up to his legend.

If you have not heard Cherkassky before, the first thing you may notice is his sonority. The honeyed, mellow tone is edgeless, from softest whispering to roaring loudness, yet always under control, and well-gauged to musical context.

His dynamics and keyboard color can surprise with their range, but he seems never to apply them for effect alone. Call it rhetoric, communication or just personal response: Cherkassky feels the music he plays, and projects his feelings. Needless to say, at this late date: They usually make sense.

Ferruccio Busoni’s long-maligned transcription of the Chaconne from Bach’s D-minor Partita (for violin alone) began this program with dignity, restraint and myriad details of color and expressive nuance.

This is not to say this performance lacked excitement, only that Cherkassky kept it within bounds, let it speak, and paced himself and the progress of the piece in a masterly manner.

Hardly pausing for breath, he then launched into Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes (without the supplementary ones) as if making them up on the spot. This was no improvisation, of course; such a sculptured, cumulative and emotionally resonant performance as this is the result only of the most careful planning and probity.

After intermission, Cherkassky gave exquisite life--and, by example, a master class in leggerezza --to Chopin’s E-major Scherzo. He then delivered his characteristic sense of spontaneity to the same composer’s F-minor Nocturne, which, for pure singing tone, effortless legato and sculptured beauties, may have been the high point of the evening.

Impishly, the gnomic pianist then interrupted all this Romanticism with a palate-cleanser in the form of Charles Ives’ charmingly abrasive “Three-Page” Sonata (1905). With the finger-busting complexities of Josef Hofmann’s quirky and irresistible “Kaleidoscop,” he returned to the display mode.

Then, by way of climax in that mode, Cherkassky revived, for 1991, Paul Pabst’s Paraphrase on “Eugene Onegin,” as delightful and joyous a virtuoso-piece as the 19th Century ever produced.

Anticlimactically, his two encores did not take an upward spiral, but went a bit flat. For the record, they were: Cherkassky’s own “Prelude Pathetique,” written at age 11 (the age of his Baltimore debut), and Chopin’s Tarantella.