MUSIC REVIEW : Pianist Gloria Cheng Excels in 20th-Century Program

A longtime specialist and local hero in contemporary music, Gloria Cheng seems to be widening her spheres of influence.

The pianist’s latest Los Angeles recital, at Occidental College, Tuesday night, one offering provocative new and old music by Joan Huang, Olivier Messiaen, John Adams, Elliott Carter and George Antheil, will be repeated in Santa Barbara tonight, and in Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall in New York City, Tuesday.

Cheng has the technique, stamina, intelligence and musical integrity to encompass a program that would be for many others an impossible feat.

Just to get through this generous and difficult agenda would tax most otherwise well-equipped pianists; Cheng not only survived, she triumphed. And she even played a charming and touching encore, Henry Cowell’s “Aeolian Harp” (1923), a work produced entirely from within the instrument (as opposed to on its keyboard).

In the process, and despite the breathtaking complexity of some of these works, Cheng made admirable musical sense of everything she played.

She conquered the demands--digital, intellectual and formal--of Messiaen’s finger-busting “Quatre etudes de rythme,” did the same for John Adams’ hugely contrasting (to Messiaen) and incontestably voluptuous “Phrygian Gates,” making both seem, if not easy, at least felicitous to virtuosos.

Huang’s virtuosic and haunting “Pipa Journey” (1992) also offers challenges to technique and intellect, to fingers and brain. Opening her program with it, Cheng projected its visceral appeal and its drama splendidly. The composer, present in the enthusiastic Bird Studio audience, acknowledged the success of this performance.

The finale to this program was Antheil’s dated “Sonate sauvage,” a curio of that composer’s early years--he wrote it in 1922, around the time he arrived in Europe.

It is a noisy, jazzy and apparently unfocused eight-minute sonatina, a product of that period before Antheil found both his persona and his style.

As a piece inspired by what was then called Negro art, it is considerably less appealing, and less accomplished, than John Powell’s “Rapsodie negre,” written five year earlier. Cheng played it with aplomb.