MUSIC REVIEW : Pianist Or Performs at Ambassador

With all the oddball repertory we have heard and enjoyed during this now-ending 1991-92 piano recital season, it was almost refreshing to hear a standard program of familiar sonatas at the Pasadena debut of Carmen Or, a youngish, Russian-born musician of glamorous appearance and idiosyncratic performance.

Pianist Or is an anachronism, or perhaps a throwback to a time that never existed.

Monday night in Ambassador Auditorium--replacing another youthful Russian, Alex Slobodyanik, who canceled his U.S. tour--Or played a program of three works only: Beethoven’s “Waldstein” and “Appassionata” Sonatas, and Chopin’s B-flat-minor Sonata.

The anachronistic aspects of the pianist’s performance include her model-like appearance--on this occasion in a shoulder-revealing, two-tone white formal gown with spaghetti straps, carrying a crimson hanky carefully color-coordinated with her lipstick and fingernail polish--her continual mugging at the instrument and her non-differentiation between musical styles.

Technically, Or seemed admirably and thoroughly prepared for the many demands she faced. At any tempo, she can be relied upon to put down the right note at the right place and time.

In the areas of rhythm, pulse, articulation, rhetoric and continuity--the stuff of actual interpretation--she is far less convincing, sometimes wayward.

In the Chopin work, for instance, weird things happened in the second movement, where Or turned the quiet G-flat section into a bumptious waltz. And throughout the sonata, she regularly confused Tempo rubato with what seemed merely a lack of planning--or a faulty sense of rhythm.

Her feeling for Beethoven’s style also revealed glitches. The opening, and many subsequent passages, of the “Waldstein” resembled a prelude by Debussy more than a middle-period sonata; the following slow movement, which moved right along--as did the comparable section of the “Appassionata”--lacked not only weight, but substance. And her smiling throughout the movement proved unnerving.

The drama in the opening movement of the F-minor Sonata succeeded, more or less, because this artist has, clearly, a fervid imagination; her failure to take the repeat in that movement, however, seriously sabotaged its integrity.

For encores, the barefoot pianist played two: Scriabin’s famous Etude in D-sharp minor, and Chopin’s F-sharp Nocturne.