On a Grand Scale : Pianist Garrick Ohlsson Says It Isn’t Always the Loudest Music That Speaks Volumes

When Garrick Ohlsson plays with an orchestra, as he will this week in Costa Mesa, it promises to be a really big shew. Indeed, one critic wrote recently that Ohlsson’s sound is “in sheer unforced size . . . unrivaled among living pianists and probably most dead ones, too.”

“People often tell me, ‘You don’t bang.’ I don’t know how that’s possible--I couldn’t play any harder than I do,” Ohlsson, 47, said last week on the phone from his home in San Francisco. “But size of sound is a relative--it’s a matter of building from the bass. Banging hard in the treble (by itself) doesn’t sound loud.

“When you experience (soprano) Jessye Norman in a hall, her sound gets all around you, and inside you-- that’s unforced size. In my young days, Birgit Nilsson was Miss Loudvoice, but that voice popped right out of the air. Others had loud voices, but they were ugly loud as opposed to beautiful loud.”

Wednesday and Thursday, Ohlsson will be the soloist with the Pacific Symphony for Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center (also on the program: the overture to Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Debussy’s “La Mer”). He assured that despite his big sound, his palette can accommodate Brahms’ more introspective passages.

“For me, sound is a physical, sensuous thing,” he said. “I want to feel sound. Some pianists are concerned with truth in structure, and composer’s intent. Think of (Rudolf) Serkin, you think of intellectual truth; Serkin’s sound wasn’t beautiful, but he wasn’t about sound. Claudio Arrau, on the other hand, was very much about sound, dark and Brahmsian, always very concerned with depth.

“I’m a bit of a sound maven.”

Ohlsson, born in White Plains, N.Y., entered the Juilliard School of Music at 13. He won first prize at the Busoni Competition in Italy at 18 and, four years later, the Gold Medal at the 1970 Chopin Competition in Warsaw. He since has performed with virtually every major orchestra in the United States and Europe. His repertory includes 70 concertos, and it’s not unusual for him to play a dozen of them in a single season.

The competition veteran lauded the format of the Ivo Pogorelich competition, underway in Pasadena: “I salute the Pogorelich for having no finals with orchestra. With concerto finals, people come to hear pianists they weren’t even interested in before, then some flashy person, like me, plays a Rachmaninoff concerto, they get blown away, and they’re mad when the judges don’t give that person the win. I also like no upper age limit--nobody is a fully formed musician at 22.

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“Now if you want to know my feelings about competitions in general, we can devote your whole Sunday section to the subject.”

Go for it.

“If you won the Chopin or Tchaikovsky competition in 1970, you were put on the front page of newspapers around the world. Those were the two. I picked the Chopin, I didn’t get the flu, I was the right person at the right time. It did for me what the magic of competition was supposed to do. I knew I would be the new kid on the block for a long time.

“Now there is an endless succession of competitions, all heavily promoted, all trying to outdo each other, and now it’s the 15-minutes-of-fame syndrome. The ultimate irony is that I don’t even know who won a lot of these. If I don’t know, and I’m a very interested party, how can the public be aware? Who won the Tchaikovsky in ‘90, for instance?”

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Though he is currently recording the complete works of Chopin for Arabesque Records (the first three compact discs in the series garnered this year’s Critics Choice award from Gramaphone magazine), Ohlsson actually has shied away from identifying too strongly with the composer since winning the Chopin competition.

Back then, he recalls, “it was common wisdom, with plenty of finger-shaking: Don’t let happen to you what happened to Van! After winning the Tchaikovsky, Van Cliburn was a cultural hero, a folk hero--such a thing has never again happened to a pianist or musician. Then he played the Tchaikovsky concerto 45 times a day for the next thousand years.

“My manager suggested that playing Chopin concertos everywhere I went would be one way to go, but I’d be running the danger of Van Cliburn burnout, of not enough stimulation. Though it might have made me easier to handle, I wasn’t a Chopin monster. I was a musician, not a specialist. For my sanity, that’s the way I went.”

* Garrick Ohlsson will be soloist with the Pacific Symphony for Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 Wednesday and Thursday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Also on the program: the overture to Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Debussy’s “La Mer.” Conductor: Carl St.Clair, the orchestra’s music director. Curtain: 8 p.m. $14-$39. (714) 755-5788.