Music Review : Away From Mainstream for Pianist Petrov

No matter what one calls him in this post-Soviet era, neo-geopolitics would seem not to be pianist Nicolai Petrov’s concern--he is too much of an iconoclast for such simple quandaries.

The program he played Wednesday night at Ambassador Auditorium, for instance, was unlike anything a typical subscription audience might happen upon. As in previous Pasadena appearances, the Russian virtuoso eschewed standard repertory in favor of a theme agenda.

Nothing on the bill was mainstream--no Russian retro romanticism, for example. Instead, Petrov delved into music that either toys with jazz elements or focuses on that American idiom altogether.

He began with the Sonata No. 3 of the Czechoslovakian composer Erwin Schulhoff, a proponent of the Second Viennese School and a Jew who died in a Nazi death camp. Alternating between a gracefully languid Ravelian style and blazingly dense, high-velocity passages, it showed Petrov as a master of cool, even intellectual, concentration.

Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 6, offered with steely precision and never anything so inelegant as clangor, came across as chaste even in its powerfully menacing and subtly burlesque sections, and all the insouciant humor of Stravinsky’s Sonata was kept bubbling just beneath its neoclassic surface.

If Petrov looks more like a stolid Russian bureaucrat than a hip jazz pianist, forget it--because in Nicolai Kapustin’s Sonata No. 2, with its bluesy ballad and arpeggiated flourishes, he played like a true cocktail bar denizen.

The encores--a Schulhoff tango reminiscent of Frederick Cohen’s “Green Table” score and a Kapustin intermezzo--fit the evening’s stylistic contours nicely.