Pianist Taylor Maintains Engaging Yet Distant Tone

Smart but impersonal, Christopher Taylor’s local debut recital, Friday night at the South Bay Center for the Arts, still engaged the listener through most of its length in a combination of largely familiar but unusually juxtaposed repertory.

In another order, the Brahms-Bolcom-Gershwin-Bach-Beethoven program could have been deadly--but it wasn’t. Beginning with Brahms’ rarely encountered Opus 9 Variations (on a Theme of Schumann), followed by six of William Bolcom’s virtuosic Etudes, Taylor kept the listener off-center and guessing about the pianist’s real personality.

Gershwin’s popular Three Preludes bridged the gap to more known territory, Bach’s A-minor Fantasy and Fugue, BWV 904, and Beethoven’s Sonata in A, Opus 101, standard fare coming after an oddball beginning.

The 26-year-old prizewinning pianist’s playing? Detached, cool and analytical, technically edgy, musically noncommittal.

Throughout this generous agenda, the listener seldom found Taylor digging into the keys as if to extract music from the large Steinway. But that did happen in the Bach pieces, and such digging paid off handsomely. Otherwise, the pianist seemed to be teasing the instrument and his listeners with light tickling.

The problematic Brahms work--clearly a youthful indiscretion uncharacteristically fragmented and self-indulgently melancholy--seemed purposefully esoteric, as did, at the other end of the program, Beethoven’s much more familiar Opus 101. Neither seemed to communicate much to the friendly El Camino College audience, which bore it all patiently and then responded positively. Maybe next time.