Music Review : Pogorelich’s Demanding Piano Program

If there is a more self-indulgent pianist in the world today than Ivo Pogorelich, we wouldn’t like to hear him.

But then, calling Pogorelich self-indulgent is like calling a giraffe long-necked. The man who walked out on Karajan has made a career out of following his own lights, and, in an era of objective pianism, he must sound like a visionary to some.

In a makeup concert for a canceled date in March, Tuesday night at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena, that field of vision seemed limited to what the 35-year-old Croatian sees in the mirror each morning. In this physically demanding program of Mussorgsky and Chopin, the pianist saw himself and beheld that it was good.

The very fact that he started with “Pictures at an Exhibition” speaks volumes, and the interpretation that ensued was so willful that one half-expected him to start laughing maniacally and declare, “Foolish Mussorgsky! Your music is mere putty in my hands!”

But, for all his thunder and lightning, fortissimo and pianissimo, push and pull, theatrical bluster and histrionic hush, the “Pictures” never came into view. The pianist’s technical wizardry made the composer’s oxcart into an 18-wheeler, his Samuel Goldenberg into a behemoth. When Pogorelich began “The Great Gate at Kiev” colossally, one wondered where he could go with it, but he managed to jack it up even further by the end.

After intermission came more of the same, with the four Scherzos of Chopin preceded by the brief Prelude, Opus 45. Again brutal pounding, again stretching phrases out of shape, again distortion of rhythm. In the simple melodic sections of these scores, the pianist chose to provide accompaniments of ravishing color, slapping out the melody above, prodding and pushing them, and then delaying cadences as long as possible. It became a mannerism and it became tedious.