MUSIC : Pianist Who Will Play in Irvine Has Gotten to Know the Competitions

Although pianist David Buechner has won a slew of prizes in international competitions, the 32-year-old Baltimore native is no fan of them.

“Competitions are really the ultimate Communist way of deciding what’s good,” Buechner said in a recent phone interview from his apartment in New York. “A board committee decides what good piano-playing is. It’s usually fairly good piano-playing, but not great piano-playing.”

Buechner, who appears with the South Coast Symphony on Saturday, feels “there is a very definite contest style of playing that has to do with limitations on tempi, dynamics, personality.

“You even have to watch your body motions. You can’t move around too much or you’re going to upset people.”

Buechner isn’t exactly expressing sour grapes. His awards include the Bronze Medal at the 1983 Queen Elizabeth of Belgium International Piano Competition, Grand Prize at the 1984 Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, fifth place in the Leeds International Competition and sixth place at the 1986 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition, among others.

(Although placing only sixth at the Tchaikovsky, he was the highest ranking American.)

“I looked at competitions as opportunities, necessary evils and a way to get my name around and my reputation established,” he said. “It was like getting visa stamps on my passport.”

Buechner began playing piano at the age of 4, when he discovered he “could read music without any instruction. It was quite a mystery. I just had a lot of natural gifts.”

Those gifts eventually won him six scholarships at the Juilliard School of Music in New York, where he began studying when he was 17. He’s lived in New York ever since.

Juilliard, he said, “had its ups and downs. But it wised me up to what the level of real music-making was and what standard I had to achieve to make it.”

Since leaving Juilliard, he has appeared with the orchestras of Philadelphia, Cleveland, San Francisco, St. Louis, Minnesota and other cities, under conductors such as Leonard Slatkin, Edo de Waart, Sergiu Comissiona and David Zinman, among others.

He made his Los Angeles recital debut in 1986 and played the Southland most recently in a 1989 recital at UCLA.

Today, he also teaches at the Manhattan School of Music and recently has recorded several compact discs for the Connoisseur label.

He returns to competitions occasionally--but nowadays as a judge.

“I have seen some of the silliness that goes on at competitions,” he said. “Someone gets up to play a Prokofiev sonata. Of the six judges, maybe one has played that piece a lot and knows it inside and out. But nobody else is going to admit that he doesn’t know it.

“But I’ll raise my hand and ask if anyone minds if I look at a score. I know a hell of a lot of repertory, but no one can know everything. Some areas I don’t know. Am I’m really competent to judge that? Yes, I know the general style. But is that really fair? I think it’s a little bit silly.”

Nonetheless, the level of piano-playing in competitions is “actually astonishingly high,” Buechner said. “But the most disturbing thing is that you would never know that piano literature spans about 500 years.

“You hear the same Chopin pieces, Beethoven sonatas. Mozart is short-shrifted; Haydn ignored. Pre-Baroque music is never played . . . Spanish music is never played. You could make lists and lists, and I’m not taking into account the marvelous amount of contemporary piano music that is never played. Well, some American pianists are a little better than their European colleagues.”

The pianist said that he knows “about 60 concertos, which is a high total. At this point, actually, I’m looking to cut down. It’s stressful to be playing something different every time I appear with an orchestra.

“But I always wanted to study a lot of different music when I was a student, and my career has naturally developed as a result of that. That’s the way that I am, too. I’m very curious about a lot of different things.”

Buechner regards Saint-Saens’ Fourth Concerto, which he will play with South Coast Symphony, as “really the best of his five.”

“It has a wonderful opening--a bit mystical and atmospheric,” he said. “Structurally, it’s a wonderful piece. He really takes the opening motive and works it, sewing it up nice and neat.

“The concerto is hard to play,” he added, “because it’s fast virtuosic stuff and it’s written a little awkwardly. For me the challenge is to give it enough color and life and verve.

“If I had to define my approach, I’d say it is really an architectural one. I want to take apart the building and look at the blocks within it, and then put it together again.”

* Pianist David Buechner will play Saint-Saens’ Fourth Concerto with the South Coast Symphony led by Larry Granger on Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Granger also will conduct works by Beethoven and Henry Cowell. Tickets: $12 to $25. (714) 854-4646.