Music Reviews : Pianist Shtarkman at Ambassador Auditorium

As it recedes into history, the 1989 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth takes on more and more significance as a seminal event, not unlike the 1981 Cliburn Competition or, perhaps better, the 1958 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.

Like those others, the 1989 contest brought together as winners--after many fine young pianists had been eliminated in earlier rounds--six of the strongest talents of their generation, in a ranking still controversial, three years later.

Alexander Shtarkman, according to Joseph Horowitz’s engrossing book on the subject of the 1989 Cliburn Competition, “The Ivory Trade,” was undervalued in the final round when he came in fourth, behind Alexei Sultanov, Jose Carlos Cocarelli and Benedetto Lupo.

Seventeen months ago, in a 300-seat auditorium in Santa Monica, the Muscovite pianist proved as much. At that time, The Times’ Martin Bernheimer praised Shtarkman’s “strength, flash and eagerness” and his “sensitivity and mellow refinement.”

In a return visit Monday night in the 1,200-seat Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, Shtarkman reconfirmed his gifts and achievement, and lived up to his own high standard.

Unfortunately, he did so with the wrong program, an agenda that showed off his musical limitations as clearly as it demonstrated his technical strengths.

Schubert’s deeply challenging “Reliquie” Sonata revealed, along with the pianist’s conscientious attention to detail, a failure of projection. Ravel’s subtle but virtuosic “Valses nobles et sentimentales” put an unflattering spotlight on Shtarkman’s narrow range of coloristic resources. Both books of Brahms’ finger-busting “Paganini” Variations became long on accuracy, short on characterization.

The unfinished Sonata in C,D. 840, has long been an anomaly in the composer’s catalogue. Considered by some musicians to be of comparable stature to its companion sonata, the A-minor (D. 845), it seems to reveal its charms only upon the ministrations of the elite. On this occasion, Shtarkman did not show that he is a member of that club.

The brilliance and poetry in Ravel’s mystery-laden waltzes also eluded Shtarkman, who attempted to indicate their emotional range and dynamic contours, but more often than not remained a visitor, rather than a guide, to this enchanted place.

Brahms’ exigent Opus 35 can sound like an integrated and fulfilling musical work or it can become a series of hurdles, a set of irksome technical exercises. While Shtarkman did not ignore the musical content of these etudes, he did seem content just to play through them.

His single encore was Schubert’s G-flat Impromptu, D. 899.