MUSIC REVIEW : Within Limits, Almond Is a Showman

Local audiences have followed avidly the career of violinist Frank Almond, the San Diego native who was a finalist in the 1986 International Tchaikovsky Competition. Although Almond now calls New York home, he maintains an annual engagement here.

His Saturday recital at College Avenue Baptist Church, a benefit for the San Diego Youth Symphony, affirmed the 27-year-old musician’s established strengths: a fluent technique, a certain steely brilliance in the uppermost range, and an affinity for those virtuoso bonbons that make purists cringe and most audiences applaud wildly. Almond’s maturing as a performer, however, appears to be on hold.

In the program-opening Mozart A Major Sonata, K. 526, Almond espoused no particular point of view, nor did he delve deeply into the complexities of the composer’s finest violin sonata. Although he coped with the first movement’s dense passage work, the slow middle movement was overly static, and the finale lacked focus.

Almond proved more forthcoming in Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne, responding enthusiastically to its jaunty neoclassical outlook. He even found an appropriately tongue-in-cheek sentiment for the second movement’s melancholy cantilena. In Debussy’s G Minor Sonata, Almond stressed the dark side of the composer’s valedictory opus, delivering its somber arabesques with agility and infusing the outer movements with stark drama.

Pianist Joanne Pearce-Martin accompanied Almond with unusual fervor and fluency--traits that overshadowed the violinist at times, especially in the Mozart Sonata.

Only in the shorter virtuoso showpieces did Almond really bloom, from the exotic, sensuous allure of Karol Szymanowski’s “Chant de Roxanne” to the perfumed melodic effusions of Alexander Glazunov’s Grand Adagio from the Ballet “Raymonda.” Almond has always had a knack for delivering this genre with old-fashioned panache and real passion. In Fritz Kreisler’s familiar Praeludium and Allegro, Almond’s tone broadened and warmed considerably.

But no career is built on brilliant etudes alone. If Almond wants to redeem the promise of his early triumphs, he needs to find depth and insight in the meatier repertory of his chosen instrument.