Music Reviews : Heady Night at Schoenberg Institute

Not only was Michael Boriskin a big winner Tuesday night at USC’s Schoenberg Institute but so were all the composers to whose music the pianist gave a thrilling exposition.

For Boriskin is a true champion. At the keyboard he knows how to bring both the emotive elements and a great physical definition to the works that come under his scrutiny. What one experiences, as a result, is his empathic immersion into the music.

But before he gets there the natty New Yorker delivers the spoken word: Ardent, literate, thoughtful, scholarly and, above all, loving, he manages to introduce each piece without ever seeming to hold forth or call attention to himself--rather, to share.

He could be an art docent, elegant in a subtle pinstripe--likening, in his news-anchor tones, one of Edward Smaldone’s “Transformational Etudes” to “a Rothko canvas.”

The program, which he called “To and From Schoenberg,” was a paragon of enlightenment, working its way from current composition backward. At each step on the path, Boriskin’s playing exhibited equal parts suavity and elan.

Whether rising to the virtuosic demands of Richard Danielpour’s Sonata--a thing of wondrous turbulence, density and brilliance as well as languor--or the “12-tone tonality” of George Perle’s “Six New Etudes,” lovely evocations of the Romantic spirit organized around a contemporary framework, the pianist went the limit.

His grasp (and therefore, the audience’s) was no less elsewhere. To each of Schoenberg’s “Six Little Piano Pieces,” he brought a seldom-heard momentousness, imbuing even the silences with palpable shape. On the Berg Sonata he bestowed an aching passion that came from the lowest depths.

Finally, there was Brahms’ “Handel Variations,” which found Boriskin digging deep into the keys to exhume what he called “the Schoenbergian source.” He did so with the kind of full-blown, face-reddening ecstasy that unfailingly carried his auditors along with him.