Music Review : Bronfman Shows Formidable Technique

Yefim Bronfman is more a thinking man’s pianist than a poet of the keyboard. In a recital Wednesday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Bronfman revealed a formidable technique and a clear, unruffled consciousness, with works by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Schumann and Scarlatti. Often missing, however, was much in the way of romantic reverie or emotional impulse.

Bronfman’s intellectual control best served Tchaikovsky’s built-in emotional extravagance in the composer’s seldom-heard “Dumka” (Russian Rustic Scene), Opus 59.

Here, Tchaikovsky, in his most Lisztian virtuosic guise, takes two contrasting folk tunes and elaborates and embroiders them until he paints a vast portrait of Slavic soulfulness and exuberance.

The emotion is built in, and Bronfman did not have to add to it.

What he needed to do was what he did--keep it within tasteful bounds and let the rhetoric speak for itself.

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Prokoviev’s early Sonata No. 2, which followed, takes a logical next step in the evolution of Russian music. Composed in 1912, it doesn’t sound today like a radical departure from Tchaikovsky, but already that composer’s emotional values are receding and technique is beginning to dominate as a new century unfolds.

Here the composer’s driving rhythms and digital complexities emerged glittering and precise, and one had to marvel at the pianist’s ease and mastery.

Less satisfying, however, were two excursions into the elusive Schumann idiom, the Arabeske, Opus 18, and Humoreske, Opus 20.

It wasn’t that Bronfman lacked sensitivity, or variety in color and touch, but there was little in the way of improvisatory freedom or emotional impulse especially in the dramatic and variable canvas of the Humoreske.

Better to have controlled thoughtfulness than sloppy romanticism, perhaps, but still, coolish Schumann disappoints.

Bronfman opened the program with three judiciously played and welcome Scarlatti Sonatas, including the ruminative C-minor (L. 352), the dance-like F major (L. 479) and the joyous D major (L. 15).

For an encore, he played Chopin’s “Revolutionary” Etude, Opus 10, No. 12.