Music Reviews : Pianist Michael Ponti Returns to Ambassador

Fistfuls of notes handily negotiated, banked fires of emotion, complicated pianistic sonorities and a pointed objectivity of thought--these are goals toward which many pianists aim, but few achieve.

Michael Ponti, an American pianist born in Germany and for nearly four decades resident in Europe, is one of the elite to reach such a pinnacle of accomplishment. After too long away--six-and-a-half years--Ponti returned to Ambassador Auditorium Sunday afternoon and gave a hall full of his partisans something to cheer about.

Actually, a lot to cheer about. In a season of blockbuster piano recitals, Ponti’s demanding program might just outweigh most of the others. It offered only four works, but each one requires deep resources of musicality, technique, versatility and stamina. And he played them all with a surpassing effortlessness, while thoroughly plumbing their content.

By an informal count, this was the third performance in three months, on the Ambassador premises, of Rachmaninoff’s complex Second Sonata--the others were by Benedetto Lupo and Ivo Pogorelich.

Where Pogorelich reveled in the complicated inner life of the work, Ponti explicated its wide-ranging dramatic scenario as from a distance. Where Lupo took a direct, apparently spontaneous, approach to the work’s many narrative threads, Ponti explored the layers of musical meaning piled up in its many chambers.

Each one, in his way, made it seem easy; Ponti excelled at making it mellow. And the many virtuosic demands contained in its pages he disposed of without undue self-display.

He did much the same with a work less accessible, and consequently less often heard: Beethoven’s Opus 106, the “Hammerklavier” Sonata.

For many listeners, including this one, Opus 106 often seems impenetrable, even in the most probing performances.

Ponti’s had an admirable sense of continuity--even, and especially, in the dense slow movement--transparent pianistic textures and a thoughtful overview that seemed to bind the movements.

The 53-year-old pianist’s program also included Liszt’s Fantasy and Fugue on B.A.C.H.--which he played at his last visit, in 1985--and Scriabin’s colorful “Vers la Flamme.” At the end, Ponti took two encores, Chopin’s D-flat Nocturne, Opus 27, No. 2, and the third movement of Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata.