Music : Cliburn Winner Nakamatsu Puts His Many Piano Gifts on Display

A certain incredulity struck when Jon Nakamatsu was named the gold medalist at the 10th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in Fort Worth in June. Such a reaction made sense, given the Cliburn’s long history--at least in the last 20 years--of choosing a talented but faceless, accomplished but half-baked top winner.

At 28, Nakamatsu, a native Californian who in recent years has won a number of other important competitions, today shows more promise than any Cliburn winner since the late Steven de Groote two decades ago.

As he displayed in his debut recital at the South Bay Center for the Arts at El Camino College on Saturday night, Nakamatsu has everything he ought to have at this juncture: a solid, effortless and comprehensive technique, wide dynamics and a spectrum of tone colors, exquisite good taste, a commanding musical authority, a searching interest in different styles and a poet’s imagination.

His program, at this first L.A.-area appearance since he was a teenager and aspiring young musician, covered much ground and managed to offer the familiar along with the esoteric. It began with a very serious and probing account--not merely pretty or whimsical--of Beethoven’s E-major Sonata, Opus 109, a performance that had the depth one associates with specialists in this repertory and hundreds of telling details to corroborate his expertise.

The pianist then brought out unhackneyed Chopin in the C-sharp-minor Polonaise and the Fantasy on Polish Airs, Opus 13, beauteous examples of rich-toned, old-fashioned virtuoso showpieces, played with emotional thoroughness. After intermission, connoisseurs had to be delighted with the astringencies of William Bolcom’s new “Nine Bagatelles,” written especially for the contestants of the 1997 Cliburn contest, and Stravinsky’s practically forgotten, endlessly delightful Four Etudes (1908).

The program proper ended with more fireworks, played poetically, Liszt’s “Sonetto 104 del Petrarca” and the Tarantella from “Venezia e Napoli.”

Even more treasurable were the first two encores, Liszt’s transcription of Schumann’s “Fruhlingsnacht” and the Polonaise in A-flat by Chopin, given a reading as broad and sensitive, as heroic and virile, as one may expect to hear.

* Pianist Jon Nakamatsu returns to play with the Brentano String Quartet at the Irvine Barclay Theatre in Irvine, Feb. 24 at 8 p.m.