MUSIC REVIEW : A Night of Mixed Pleasures With Pianist Robert Taub

Highly accomplished and incontrovertibly gifted, American pianist Robert Taub has one other quality that has regularly surfaced in his local appearances over the past decade: inconsistency. At his latest return, Wednesday night to Bing Theater at the L.A. County Museum of Art, Taub again specialized in that syndrome.

In an engrossing program projected with color and nuance but not always with intensity, Taub brought musical sense and reliable technique to music by Bach, Berg, Beethoven and Brahms. Yet he seldom appeared to be in top form, or in a mood to share.

What he played best was the most challenging of these works, Brahms’ “Paganini” Variations. Taub clearly sees these not as a series of etudes or technical hurdles--they are that too--but as a succession of Brahmsian moods. For once, one could savor the separate items as emotional vignettes. And, if the playing emerged here not absolutely immaculate, many other joys compensated.

At the other end of the program, Bach’s C-minor Partita offered pristine pleasures in an uncomplicated, direct and elegant style. Taub’s rhetoric, here and throughout the program, proved again subdued and restrained, within a sound range not notably voluminous. Yet his Bach spoke convincingly.

So did his way with the music of Alban Berg, three Schumannesque, until-recently undiscovered early pieces and the great and moody Sonata, Opus 1. Then, Taub’s playing of Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata sounded tired; it needs to go back to the shop.