MUSIC REVIEW : Versatile Pianist Closes Recital Series

Reports of the demise of the piano recital continue to be exaggerated. Indeed, the genre thrives, despite hall closings and other downsizings in the concert world.

Closing a first season, the enterprising and repertorially challenging Piano Spheres series, new in 1994-95, presented Susan Svrcek in the sanctuary at Neighborhood Church in Pasadena on Tuesday night. Svrcek chose a program both bold and heroic, and played it in a big-boned manner.

Perhaps too big-boned--the gorgeous, huge, brand-new Fazioli piano often seemed too large for this comfortable hall, which may hold more than 200 people. The Italian instrument produces resonance for a room three times that size--at least.

Nevertheless, this event heartened the discouraged. It reconfirmed one’s faith in the power of musical versatility, intelligence and strong fingers--all of which Svrcek seems to command effortlessly.

Ending the recital and the season, she gave Ives’ “Concord” Sonata its due in sonority and overview, riding the climaxes but finding the quietude. She is an accomplished technician with a huge dynamic palette in her fingers and arms, but she uses this arsenal with a pointed musicality.

In the middle of the first half, for instance, she applied a miniaturist’s sense of detail to the dozen short, mordant pieces in Witold Lutoslawski’s “Folk Melodies” (1945), a wondrous, character-filled suite all of 11 minutes in length.

Surrounding that, there was Chopinesque emotion, first in the genuine article, the D-flat Nocturne, Opus 27, No. 2, then in a dense hommage, Frederick Lesemann’s revised, 1990s Ballade, which the composer--a longtime USC professor, and Svrcek’s husband--modeled on the F-minor Ballade.

It is a gripping work, thoroughly and atonally of this decade, yet it seems to cram a quarter-hour of original music into 10 brief minutes. Too tight.