Dublin Winner Performs Chopin, Schubert

Winner of the 1997 Dublin International Piano Competition, Los Angeles native Max Levinson, gave his first recital here since that victory Tuesday night in the Skirball Center’s Magnin Auditorium.

The 25-year-old musician devoted the lion’s share of his program to meaty mainstays of the repertory--Schubert’s “Wandererfantasie” and Chopin’s 24 Preludes--leavening them with a dollop of Kirchner. The results were mixed.

His playing was marked by a strong intellectual grasp of the music at hand, and by the means to make his thoughts audible, but was somewhat lacking in personal charisma. This can be either refreshing or a problem in Romantic repertoire; Tuesday it dampened the masterworks a bit.

His performances emerged fully formed--crisply, purposefully phrased, sensitively nuanced and sensibly paced. The level of technical accomplishment was high, clarity being an especially strong suit, though these were not note-perfect accounts.

His reading of the “Wandererfantasie,” Schubert’s most overtly virtuosic piano piece, had plenty of impulse behind it. Levinson’s tempos were on the fast side, his syntax snappy and logical. The closing pages were thrilling in their speed but lacked monumentality because of it.

The Preludes only intermittently came to life, though they remained uniformly pithy and trenchant. Their brevity seemed immune to Levinson’s thoughtful approach, which turned poetic fancy and lyrical flights into prose. It was interesting to note that the longest Prelude, the “Raindrop,” was also Levinson’s best, allowing him the scope to build structure and mold ideas.

In between the Schubert and Chopin, the pianist sandwiched Leon Kirchner’s Five Pieces, a typically volatile work from the composer in a neo-Scriabinesque style. Its sharply etched, wide-ranging gestures and scampering, thundering scat lines alternate with starry chord clusters that are allowed to ring and decay. Levinson offered a friendly spoken intro, then launched into a committed, strongly limned reading.