MUSIC REVIEWS : Pogorelich Shows His Unique Style

Eccentricity, as a way of life, can take different forms. But in the case of Ivo Pogorelich, who played Wednesday the first of two recitals at Ambassador Auditorium, the trait is so deeply ingrained it seems a guidepost to both the substance and style of what he offers his public.

Take the pianist’s stage manner, as the most obvious manifestation. He glides from the wings ever so slowly, almost somnolent, as though to an empty room. The audience may as well not be there--even after the program’s single heroic item, Liszt’s B-minor Sonata, he issues a momentary quasi-bow and but a faint, remote smile before ambling away.

If the above were mere affectation it would count for little. But Pogorelich is a true iconoclast, musically. That suggests in part how he could make a main course from 12 Scarlatti sonatas, not the two or three most pianists program as a palate-cleanser.

Occupying the evening’s first half, they were illuminating--equivalent, in a way, to Chopin etudes--and Pogorelich brought to them the full array of pianistic effects.

After intermission he refused to change gears, however, even with the beckoning of full-blown Romantics. What the audience got, as a result, was deconstructed Brahms--the brooding F-sharp-minor Capriccio from Opus 76 and the most gorgeous of all A-major Intermezzo from Opus 118.

Forget palpable longing and intimacy. In his hands the pieces became objects of analytic scrutiny, taken apart, turned over, examined--but in a desultory, disconnected, noodling sort of way.

The Liszt also got thoroughly desentimentalized. While the chordal storms produced their wonted sense of raging catastrophe, and the fragile tenderness became just that, the pianist’s effete experimentalism--extreme tempos, strange sonorities, oddly accented notes--brought an otherworldly aura to the work.

After returning, for encores, to Scarlatti and Brahms--but astutely ending with the all-out Russian showpiece, Balakirev’s “Islamey”--he left one listener wondering: Exactly where is this strange mind?