MUSIC REVIEW : Pogorelich Returns to the Ambassador

Recent weeks have brought us several prominent musical eccentrics. Saturday, Ivo Pogorelich reaffirmed his place as one of the most characterful pianists of his--or any--generation, in the first of two recitals at Ambassador Auditorium.

Though nobody’s purist, Pogorelich does not offer iconoclasm for its own jolting sake. The central paradox of his playing is his ability to make obviously carefully considered, deeply felt and highly personal interpretations seem created on the wing--and absolutely inevitable.

His method combines the most sophisticated range of timbral techniques with implausibly long-spanned phrases across severe tempo fluctuations. His weapon of choice is the ritardando, whether applied in local decoration, as at almost every cadence of Ravel’s “Valses nobles et sentimentales,” or as a major architectural element, as in the great consumptive denouements of his Chopin Nocturnes.

Ravel is probably not the first composer we associate with Pogorelich but the Yugoslavian pianist serves him with engaging color and lilt.

Don’t try out that box-step you remember from cotillion here, however, or you will certainly dislocate something. That is, of course, the composer’s intent in large measure, but Pogorelich extends Ravel’s subversive twists with deceptively languid asymmetries of accent.

Pogorelich’s Chopin group on this occasion listed the Nocturnes in C minor (Opus 48, No. 1), E-flat (Opus 55, No. 2) and E (Opus 62, No. 2), with the B-minor Sonata. He hides nothing--every note is individually groomed and distinct, but fully integrated.

He also shifts the center of musical gravity from his right hand to his left at the most cathartic moments, notably here in the E-flat Nocturne and the Largo of the Sonata.

In the finale of Rachmaninoff’s Sonata in B-flat-minor, the pronounced imbalance seemed a more purely manual matter. Whatever troubles Pogorelich experienced, his playing remained volcanic in speed and power, and lyrical in line throughout this very difficult music.

As if to prove the trifling nature of such hurdles, he turned to the florid, kinetic dazzle of Balakirev’s “Islamey” in encore. And then to revive questions about a finger he seemed to favor, he added an enigmatic valedictory fragment of Ravel’s Prelude.