MUSIC REVIEWS : Pianist Lortie Proves a Worthy Contender

It was almost as if Louis Lortie was welcoming comparison, was inviting comparison, with the heavyweights of the keyboard in his recital Friday night. To program the music that he did--Beethoven’s “Pathetique” and “Appassionata” Sonatas, Chopin’s Preludes, Opus 28--is to do so, and took something very much like chutzpah. Chutzpah that paid off.

Actually, the young Canadian pianist is already quite seasoned. He has made a number of recordings, concertizes internationally and has won prizes in the Leeds and Busoni competitions. And, as his appearance in Marsee Auditorium at the South Bay Center for the Arts showed, if his name doesn’t immediately come up with the present-day biggies of the piano, it should and probably will.

He opened with a forceful and direct reading of the “Pathetique” Sonata, illuminating in detail and purposeful in direction. The Adagio cantabile unwound steadily, the melody singing fully, nothing dainty or dreamy here. He sculpted and shaped and shaded each passing phrase throughout the work, but never fussily so, always with an ear for the drama both short and long range.

His account of the “Appassionata” was a more spacious affair, in the outer movements deliberate, flexible, slowish and majestic--like orations from a Shakespearean actor--in the central Andante, a reading of surpassing beauty, glowing and poetically gracious.

If one had to make an objection to Lortie’s taut interpretation of the Preludes, it would be that he a little too insistently controlled the discourse--dotted every i, inserted commas and dashes everywhere, inflected every clause and sub-clause--when simplicity and fluidity would have been preferable. But the flip side was a very active, alive reading; even the whirlwind movements never sounded like finger exercises, due to this shaping.

In encore he offered an elegantly whizzing and energized run-through of Chopin’s Etude Opus 10, No. 4--just further notice that Lortie is to be reckoned with.