Pianist Ratser Plays With Dazzling Form

Pianist Dmitri Ratser is no stranger to Pasadena, having given well-received recitals at the once-glorious and now-defunct Ambassador Auditorium. Saturday night, he stepped out on a different stage, the Pasadena Civic Auditorium, as soloist with the Pasadena Symphony. The vehicle was Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and the results were dazzling, in a way that combined technical flourish with lived-in maturity.

Ratser, a Russian who enjoyed a healthy career behind the Iron Curtain when there still was one, has been carving out a new career in the West in the ‘90s. In Pasadena, he offered a Lisztian treatment that took into account the work’s dynamic extremes, but seamlessly. His was an integrated and superbly nuanced approach to the music, emphasizing music-making over showboating, right up to the piece’s almost slobberingly martial finale.

Opening the concert, conductor Jorge Mester led his finely tuned ensemble in the work of another Hungarian composer, Dohnanyi, whose innocuous “Ruralia Hungarica” takes the influence of Hungarian folk songs in a different direction than Bartok ever did. The piece basks in bucolic life, with a post-Romantic flourish.

A pared-down orchestra returned after intermission for Beethoven’s Second Symphony. The work, written in 1801, plays like a fond farewell to the prior century’s classical lineage and keeps the inner torment of Beethoven’s later music pretty much at bay. Fleeting moments of raggedness aside, Mester and orchestra attended to the evening’s music with the polish and energy we’ve come to expect of them.