MUSIC REVIEW : Storm and Calm at Pogorelich Finale

By the time you read this, it will be all over but the grumbling.

The jury at the controversial, exhaustive and exhausting Ivo Pogorelich Competition has done its work. The winning pianists--Edith Chen and Michael Harvey at the top--have been announced.

Before the judges retired to their chamber on Wednesday, however, two final finalists had to be heard at Ambassador Auditorium. It was, by Pogorelich standards, a short night for musical trials and tribulations, beginning at six and ending only at 10:10.

The contestants on display offered a fascinating study in stylistic contrasts. Sergei Babayan--a 32-year-old Clevelander from Armenia--reveled in exaggeration that flirted with violence. Irina Plotnikova--a 39-year-old Muscovite--turned out to be relatively calm, mild-mannered nearly to the point of pedantry.

The judges, not incidentally, made Plotnikova one of two second-tier winners (reliable observers claim she had been more impressive in previous rounds). Babayan had to be content to share a compensatory award with the three remaining finalists (reliable observers debated whether he deserved even that relatively lowly citation).

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Old-fashioned conformity would not seem to be a high priority for Babayan in any case, on any level. For the first half of his recital, he chose a uniform of no-tie and tails, the sleeves of his jacket pushed up to expose a silky black shirt. After intermission, he rolled down his sleeves, swapped the black shirt for a white one, but still favored the clash of casual brown shoes.

In the long run, his sartorial eccentricity didn’t matter. His musical eccentricity did.

He began rather nicely--brooding, dreaming and only occasionally banging his way through three transcriptions by Franz Liszt of Lieder by Franz Schubert. Then, ignoring at least four decades of musicological progress, he proceeded to Romanticize the Baroque impulses of Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations, and did so with more flair than finesse.

At white-shirt time, he charted Chopin’s F-sharp Barcarolle, Opus 60, through rough waters. In Mozart’s “Ah, vou dirai-je, Mamam” (a.k.a. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”) variations, he found the whimsical passages more congenial than the aggressive ones, which threatened bombast.

His playing was agreeably explosive in the four “Sarcasm” miniatures of Prokofiev, but he lost his cool--and tested ours--in a splashy, horrendously vulgar reduction of Ravel’s “La Valse.” For better or worse, Babayan gave the music everything at his disposal. Luckily for everyone, but most luckily for the tinkly Yamaha he chose to play, there weren’t any sledgehammers handy.

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Sanity and restraint returned, and not a moment too soon, when Plotnikova took over, on the unscathed house Steinway. She struck this listener as a thoughtful artist--more convincing, perhaps, in lyrical than in dramatic challenges--and a slightly imperfect technician.

She defined the rhapsodic qualities of Franck’s Prelude, Chorale and Fugue with easy flair, if without much grandeur. She delineated the character shifts of Debussy’s “Estampes” with much color, if not with maximum finesse. Then she dispatched Liszt’s “Rhapsodie Espagnole” with tasteful brio.

After intermission, she concentrated exclusively on the extended rigors of Prokofiev’s B-flat Sonata, No. 8, sounding especially elegant while observing dynamic niceties in the reflective passages. She found the mighty climaxes something of a strain, but even here she savored sensitivity--a virtue especially prized in the contest context.

No sledgehammer for Plotnikova.