Done Competing Against Himself : When Pianist’s Eyes Were on the Moscow Prize, Audiences’ Were on the PBS Documentary

You’d think people might remember you if you won a medal at the most renowned piano competition in the world. In the case of pianist Stephen Prutsman, however (who did just that at the 1990 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow), people’s memories are often oblique.

According to Prutsman, soloist at “Mozart in the Meadows” tonight, whatever celebrity he gained was “more for the documentary that was made about the event than for the event itself.”

“The documentary [which aired on PBS in December ‘90] showed the difficulties foreigners had to endure while competing for a month, one of which was just finding food,” said Prutsman, 35, reached earlier this week by phone between performances at the Vancouver Chamber Music Festival.

“This was after communism had [fallen], and things were more or less in chaos,” he said. “There was no governing body watching over competitors, and finding food in Moscow was difficult. Everybody wanted $75 to serve you.

“People who saw that documentary remember me.”

The San Francisco-based Prutsman joins the Pacific Symphony at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre for Mozart’s Piano Concert No. 24 in C Minor. Music director Carl St.Clair also leads the orchestra in two Mozart symphonies, Nos. 34 and 35 (“Haffner”).

Although background materials and recent news releases variously imply that Prutsman was “top medalist” and “top prize winner” at the Tchaikovsky event, he was in fact a top prize winner--fourth prize to be exact, though that’s hardly something to sneeze at. The next year, Prutsman was second at the Queen Elizabeth International Piano Competition and a recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant.

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That was also the year Prutsman quit competing.

“Most presenters and management companies are not interested if an American does well in a competition,” he said. “And most kids enter competitions because they don’t have any other option. . . . I don’t need to and don’t want to.”

Prutsman’s got options now. His career is buzzing along--he performs solo recitals this year in Washington, D.C., Berlin and at several venues in Japan, and also orchestral engagements here (he plays with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl Sept. 1 and 2) and abroad.

In April, he joined violinist Pamela Frank for a tour of the East Coast (including Carnegie Hall in New York) and Europe; he and Frank play a movement of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata on the soundtrack for the film “Immortal Beloved” (in release earlier this year, now on video), but that cut was not included on the CD. Prutsman co-founded the El Paso Pro-Musica International Chamber Music Festival in 1991 and continues to serve as director.

The Norwalk-born Prutsman traces his musical heritage back to Beethoven specialist Artur Schnabel through his teachers, Aube Tzerko of Los Angeles, with whom he studied from age 13 through a year at UCLA, and Leon Fleischer, his instructor at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore from 1982 to 1989. Both Tzerko and Fleischer studied with Schnabel, who Prutsman believes taught the piano world “how to look beneath the surface of a Beethoven sonata, and the need to come to clear convictions about everything in a four-bar phrase.”

This time out it’s not Beethoven, but Mozart. The pianist described writing his own first-movement cadenza as “a considerable challenge,” but the challenge throughout the C-minor Concerto is finding the especially fine line between the pristine and the dramatic.

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Said Prutsman, “It’s a question of understanding that so much care goes into sound production . . . and understanding that the meaning of each [individual] pitch in Mozart has a unique and specific function--and carries meaning.

“That is less likely in the case of a concerto by Rachmaninoff or Prokofiev, where it’s more the large gesture, the large accumulation of sound. It adds a different level of responsibility. . . . If one pitch is lost, it’s very much apparent.

“At the same time, realizing there is so much to be concerned about, you can’t be up there sitting hunched over the keyboard, like is this a life-or-death situation, while performing a very elegant rondo. . . . This is music to be enjoyed.”

* Carl St.Clair leads the Pacific Symphony in music of Mozart including, with Stephen Prutsman as soloist, the Piano Concerto No. 24 in C Minor, K. 491, tonight at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre. 8 p.m. $13-$49. Ticketmaster, (714) 740-2000.