MUSIC REVIEW : Pianist Murray Perahia Returns to Westwood

The art of Murray Perahia, the much-admired American pianist who has been visiting Southern California for more than two decades, continues to evolve and to widen its horizons. It is an art based on versatility, a deep command of styles, musical conscientiousness and impassioned rhetoric.

Returning to Westwood on Wednesday night, the 46-year-old native New Yorker displayed several facets of his celebrated pianistic and musical resources. Before intermission, he brought reliability and stolidity to Beethoven’s first Piano Sonata (Opus 2, No. 1) and to four Brahms works. In the second half, he produced exquisite, thoughtful and heroic Chopin.

Wadsworth Theater may be an excellent venue for a piano recital--it has certainly proved so in seasons past--but on this occasion the place, or perhaps just the instrument occupying the stage, seemed less than optimally expressive in its welcome, more mechanical and clunky than fluent and malleable.

Nevertheless, Perahia managed to make some beautiful music in this room and on this piano, especially in the Chopin half, when he offered two Ballades, two Etudes, three Mazurkas and the Berceuse.

He chose to underline the violent, rather than the tender, side of the sometimes bucolic F-major Ballade; later, he unraveled at controlled high speeds the dramatic content in the complex F-minor Ballade. Even so, most cherishable were his Mazurkas (in D, A minor and F minor), which became polished gems of keyboard poetry.

Earlier, however, Beethoven’s first F-minor Sonata, emerged dutiful in articulation and woody in sound. And Brahms’ B-minor Rhapsody and B-minor Capriccio, E-flat-minor Intermezzo and E-flat Rhapsody, needed many more colors and moods to fill out their familiar emotional contours. While the lack of hues may have been the Steinway’s fault, the missing wit and humors had to be the province of the pianist.

A large and approving audience demanded encores; its first reward was the E-flat Waltz (No. 5) of Chopin.