Pianist Ohlsson Excels in Revelatory UCLA Recital

The American musician Garrick Ohlsson has actually grown up before our eyes. He was already a well-known competition winner when he captured the top prize in the international Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1970. A year later, the young pianist played at the Hollywood Bowl, and has returned here many times.

Friday night, coming back to UCLA--but not Royce Hall, scene of his local recital debut in 1976--Ohlsson again made a musical and personal triumph. A loyal cadre of fans in Schoenberg Hall yelped approbation after the opening Beethoven sonata (in G, Opus 31, No. 1), and with good reason: The pianist found deep-seated warmth, humor and wryness in the familiar work.

His subsequent playing of Prokofiev’s Eighth Sonata did not eschew the violence and alienation on and below its surface, but projected the lyrical core of the work, its yearning and songfulness. Long ago, we learned to take Ohlsson’s comprehensive technique and tonal palette for granted; this performance did not disappoint in those areas.

Chopin, though it first brought him to fame, has been a stumbling block for some Ohlsson observers. Odd to say, but he has grown into the style. His account of the F-minor Fantasy, so disappointing at that Royce Hall event 22 years ago, has blossomed, expanded, added shades of feeling and a narrative thrust the earlier did not promise.

As he has done before, Ohlsson threatened to make his listeners melt with the beauties in his playing of the Nocturnes in C-sharp minor and D-flat, Opus 27. These were the heart of a touching and revelatory Chopin group, which also contained the Second Waltz, the C-sharp minor Scherzo, and the Introduction and Variations, Opus 12. Two weeks after his 50th birthday (April 3), Ohlsson now lives up to the responsibility of his Chopin mantle.