Pianist Delgado Accents the Romantic Era at LACMA

Pianist Eduardo Delgado took the stage at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Wednesday, serving up a recital of highly personal relevance. Here, the Argentina-born Delgado, who travels the world and presently teaches at Cal State Fullerton, established a logical, workable link between the early Romantic music of Schubert and Chopin and 20th century sounds from Argentine composers Alberto Ginastera and nuevo tango legend Astor Piazzolla, with a pinch of material from Spanish composer Enrique Granados to mediate.

Although Delgado’s Romantic spirit arrived on the stage fully intact, his well-intentioned but fuzzy reading of Schubert’s Four Impromptus, Opus 90, didn’t always find a seamless accord between technique and expression. Clear notes and meaning weren’t entirely in place. On the familiar turf of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2 in B-flat Minor, Opus 31, Delgado burrowed deep into the restless, heroic sentiment of the piece, but his interpretation was alternately persuasive and unsettled.

Generally, Delgado fared best in the recital’s second half, beginning with his lucid essaying of Granados’ “The Maiden and the Nightingale,” taken from the Goyesca Suite, pieces inspired by the Spanish painter. Suite de Danzas Criollas, Opus 15, by Argentina’s iconic composer Ginastera, is a song set of deceptive simplicity and melodicism, with tunes pricked by little dissonances and feisty syncopations.

Last came Piazzolla’s “Adios Nonino,” a 1959 piece transcribed for piano from an arrangement for “tango quintet” and full of the radical dynamic contrasts typical of Piazzolla’s music. Here, Delgado rose to the occasion with all the right elements in place--a latter-day Romantic with a sharp ear for Latin inflections.