Pianist Glazier’s Recital Well-Played but Circuitous

A solo recital should be a communion between musician and listener, a mutual journey that brings both closer to the music at hand. Pianist Richard Glazier’s oddly constituted program--presented Wednesday in the Bing Theater at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art--made the journey an unnecessarily bumpy one. Jumping here to there, one couldn’t easily find its logical course.

Perhaps these were just favorite pieces of the pianist, winner of the 1994 Pro Musicis International Award, which results in recitals in New York, Paris and Rome, in addition to this one. He opened with two Scarlatti sonatas as throat-clearers and followed with Schubert’s Impromptu, Opus 90, No. 1. Later, four Gershwin song transcriptions preceded Liszt’s bombastic “Funerailles,” which led to Prokofiev’s even more bombastic Toccata, Opus 11. Figure that out.

Luckily, the playing was exceptional. Meticulous with detailing and touch, free and easy with pulse, Glazier revealed a quick understanding for the rhetorical ebb and flow, highs and lows of what he played. Schumann’s “Faschingsschwank aus Wien” unfolded in its romantic extremes, swashbuckling and delicately poetic. He offered Scarlatti’s Sonatas K. 322 and K. 159 with casual flair, the ornate lines silkenly, ebulliently wrought.

The gussied-up Gershwin transcriptions by Percy Grainger, Earl Wild and Beryl Rubinstein may not have been to fastidious taste, but Glazier performed them in suitably fluid style. His brilliant technique was displayed in clearly textured accounts of the Liszt and Prokofiev. But his encore, Chopin’s C-sharp minor Nocturne, Opus posthumous, seemed to shout, “Never play me on a Yamaha grand again.”