MUSIC REVIEW : Lucchesini Shows His Technical Skills

Unpretentious and easygoing, Andrea Lucchesini strolls onstage as if on his way to a ball game. But the game the Italian pianist plays is a serious one, and deserves deeper probing than he seems to bring to it. Concert halls do not have to be churches, but if they serve only as recreation rooms, what can the listener take home that lasts longer than fast food?

For his third Ambassador Auditorium recital in eight years, the 28-year-old prize-winner offered a varied and showy program, a happy face and plenty of technique, Monday night. In performing it, he rose to every digital challenge insouciantly, and made musical sense of every phrase, sentence and paragraph.

Indeed, Lucchesini remains enormously musical in terms of rhetoric and timing and an understanding of structure. But being musical and making music are different activities.

Nowhere in this program of Beethoven (the 32 Variations in C minor and the Sonata, Opus 101), Brahms (the complete “Paganini” Variations) and Bartok (the Sonata, Opus 26) did he seem to assert an individual character or a compelling personality. Correct and clean playing is his norm, passionate statements and newfound insights apparently outside his resourcefulness.

The neutral, sometimes metallic sound Lucchesini makes at the instrument is his principal attribute, but it never becomes varied, colorful or expressive enough to engage the serious or experienced listener. Getting around the keyboard competently ought to be only the first step in interpreting the masterworks of the literature, not a goal in itself. It is not enough to climb half the mountain.

These performances, then, admirably effortless, proved forgettable. Most interesting was the Bartok Sonata, which seemed to move from first to last with a certain inevitability; needless to say, however, it contains many more colors and emotional details than Lucchesini discovered.