MUSIC REVIEWS : Pianist Bolkvadze in a Return Recital

A bold and impassioned musician, Elisso Bolkvadze forces the listener to forgive her inconsistencies.

Returning to Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, where she made a remarkable impression in a May, 1991, recital, the pianist from the former Soviet republic of Georgia again played a demanding program with pertinent artistry and a complete technical arsenal on Thursday night.

More important in the long run, she reiterated her uniqueness as a keyboard figure of charismatic presence. At the same time, she revealed small chinks in her armor: a penchant for rushing through passages that would better be served by savoring, a predilection for tempos faster than articulate, a habit of traversing entire portions of a work in an unthinking way.

And one particularly irritating quirk: leaving minimal time between movements--sometimes even between works on a program.

Given the great sweep and manifest authority of Bolkvadze’s performances, these negatives may be discountable in a pianist who turned 26 only last month. Even with flaws, she is a major artist.

The three works that made up her Thursday program certainly proclaimed her such.

To Chopin’s B-minor Sonata, she brought a genuine Romantic urgency, affectionate but unexaggerated defining of the composer’s lyric content and as fluent, smooth and creamy a traversal of quick passages as one might wish. Even though she rushed from movement to movement, Bolkvadze differentiated sharply between them, giving each its emotional due, and its special place in the dramatic scheme of the entirety.

She began her recital with a sometimes unpolished, if consistently intense, run-through of Beethoven’s so-called “Tempest” Sonata, Opus 31, No. 2. Here was a reading that gripped the listener, even though it may not yet be completely formed in the artist’s consciousness. A few clinkers aside, the pianist showed that this work may one day be her specialty.

With only a moment’s rest, off-stage, Bolkvadze then quickly returned to deliver as effortless and dynamically alert a performance of Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit” as one has heard in recent years.

Some pianists play “Gaspard” with more gentility-- genteel will never describe this hot-blooded musician--some with more limpid pianissimos . Few bring to it the emotional and dramatic range of this admirable keyboard overachiever.

Two pieces by Chopin became her encores: the “posthumous” Nocturne in C-sharp minor and the Etude in F, Opus 10, No. 8.