Ohlsson Performs Intimate Evening of Chopin at Bowl

Certain forms of dramatic fiction may require the willing suspension of disbelief, but so do outdoor piano recitals. Wednesday Garrick Ohlsson played an uncompromising but decidedly Populist Chopin program at the Hollywood Bowl and, for the willing spirits in the modest audience, reduced the vast expanses to something close to intimacy.

That demanded the suspension of most expectations of what acoustic piano sound should be, and the acceptance of an uningratiating amplified substitute of booming bass and clipped mid-range. Ohlsson’s broad dynamic scale came through readily, but the pianist had to suggest color through context and characterization.

An acclaimed Chopinist of rare stylistic sympathy and imposing technique, Ohlsson can clearly communicate, even without physical immediacy to the audience. Untroubled by generic preconceptions, he built each piece from the ground up on a foundation of fluid, focused rhythm.

That was as true of the B-minor Sonata as it was of the waltzes and mazurkas. Ohlsson can be indulgent with the most gossamer of Chopin’s lyric rhapsodies, and he spun out the sonata’s slow movement as a seemingly attenuated reverie. But though the rate of respiration may have been slow, it was still rhythm that was the breath of life, allowing the long-spanned music to emerge as a single, exalted exhalation.

Ohlsson kept the familiar drama of the G-minor Ballade urgent through consistent energy and sternly articulated rhetoric. He allowed a full measure of internal spontaneity while maintaining purposeful propulsion down a firmly delineated course.

The arduous first-half of the program also included the Four Mazurkas of Opus 30 and the Impromptu No. 2. Ohlsson’s mazurkas--not Chopin’s most instantly engaging examples of the dance--were uncommonly introspective, more emotionally reflective than kinetically reactive.

The second half had the popular Three Waltzes of Opus 64 at its core and the mettlesome B-flat-minor Scherzo at the end. Ohlsson continued to work miracles of musical grace, though beset here by noisy aerial intrusions. The enigmatically innocuous Concert Allegro, Opus 46, and the serenely singing Nocturne in E-flat, Opus 9, No. 2, completed the printed program.

In encore, Ohlsson offered a buoyant, eminently danceable Grand Waltz in E-flat and a virtuosically conventional but also slyly insinuating account of the A-flat Polonaise, Opus 53.