MUSIC REVIEWS : Pedroni’s West Coast Debut

As inexorably as the Olympic games, every four years the major, international piano competitions in Moscow and Fort Worth process the arts-in-progress of credentialed keyboard careerists, subject them to a harassing scrutiny and spit out winners and losers.

Books have been written about the unfairness of these competitions and their negative effects on music today and piano playing in the future. Still they continue, and the public watches in fascination. And flocks to hear the victors.

This ritual was reiterated Thursday night at Ambassador Auditorium, which since 1977 has presented the Gold Medal winner of the Van Cliburn International Competition in Fort Worth in his first U.S. recital after leaving Texas.

On June 6 in Fort Worth, Simone Pedroni, an Italian pianist, 24 years old, took first place, winning two years’ worth of concert engagements, $15,000 in cash, a recording contract and, of course, the gold medal. This week in Pasadena, he played his winner’s recital before a sold-out auditorium of 1,260 seats, to which extra chairs had been added in the orchestra pit and on the stage.

As always, this event attracted a strange audience made up of music professionals and the oddball curious--people one never sees at piano recitals. Pedroni’s program offered major sonatas by Haydn and Rachmaninoff, a Liszt transcription and Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.”

It is easy to rank Pedroni against the last three Cliburn winners, Andre-Michel Schub, who won in 1981 at the age of 28; Jose Feghali, who won in 1985 at 24, and Aleksei Sultanov, the 1989 winner at age 19. It is more problematic to make a prediction about his future.

Like Schub, Pedroni is a thorough and efficient player, unflinching and fearless in matters of technique. Like Feghali, he seems to be an all-purpose, rather than a deeply committed, musical stylist. Unlike Sultanov, he is a cool performer, unspontaneous and apparently uncharismatic.

By now, it is no secret that this quadrennial ritual has become one of disappointment.

Heroic pianists, like Lochinvars of the keyboard, may have disappeared from the planet. There are always admirable qualities in the arriving victor, but few saving graces. Schub these days seems to have settled into a boring respectability; Feghali, last heard from in 1991, sounded at that time merely ordinary; Sultanov, now 23, has remained outside the limelight (he may come crashing back).

At this recital, Pedroni accomplished two very decent performances, at each end of the evening, first in an impressive, virtuosic and musicianly reading of Haydn’s Sonata No. 50, in C, then in the contrasting showcasing of the Mussorgsky suite.

Neither work surpassed any international standards for individuality, probity or illumination. But they showed the pianist as a musician of achievement.

His coloristic and dynamic palette will no doubt limit his future: His range of sound seems, as shown most exposingly in the ought-to-be-kaleidoscopic Second Sonata of Rachmaninoff, monochromatic in the extreme.

Whether this is a failure of imagination or of technique is impossible to specify; in any case, the result is a sameness, a blandness and a curtailing of interpretive options. Even in its best moments, the tone that Pedroni produces is not alluring. And, more often than not, it is metallic, edgy and brittle, the kind of uninteresting sound that sends listeners out of the room.

On Thursday, the most compelling reason to flee turned out to be that high-water mark of gilded Romanticism, Liszt’s transcription of Wagner’s “Liebestod.” Here, Pedroni left out not only suavity of sound and legato vocal lines, but all sense of inner voicing and stratification of orchestral parts. One heard a lot of notes and no transcendence, diligent piano playing without a lyric vision.

At the end, the pianist offered two encores: a Siberian Dance by Rossini and the Nocturne in E-flat, Opus 9, No. 2, by Chopin.