Stein Offers Probing Recital in Piano Spheres Series

Leonard Stein has had such an impact on music in Los Angeles as a teacher, scholar and impresario that it can be easy to forget how important he has been as a pianist. Monday he reminded us with a characteristically probing and multi-threaded recital at the Neighborhood Church of Pasadena, part of the valuable Piano Spheres series that he oversees.

The main focus was on musical transformations through variation and transcription traced along a Busoni-Schoenberg axis. Younger fingers than Stein’s have been defeated by the oppressive turgidity of Busoni’s Sonatina No. 1, and he communicated scant justification for his suffering and ours there, but he had fascinating material to work with in Busoni’s adaptation and variations on Mozart’s unlikely Bachian homage, the K. 574 Gigue, from Book III of “An die Jugend.”

Stein closed his concise program with Busoni’s prolix elaboration of Schoenberg’s Opus 11, No. 2, Klavierstuck, followed by the original--and equally vehement and iterative--Opus 11, No. 3, and Schoenberg’s “Variations on a Recitative for Organ” in Stein’s own transcription. The points of the Opus 11 duel were largely contextual, but the interesting and under-represented organ variations were nobly reinterpreted by Stein, a former Schoenberg pupil who surely knows this music as well as anyone.

At the center of the recital, surrounding intermission, were the Klavierstuck IX by Stockhausen and Hanns Eisler’s Opus 3 Klavierstucke. Stein used the spacious Stockhausen piece to regroup from the terrors of Busoni, concentrating on suggestive sonority. The four substantial and characterful Eisler pieces found Stein at his mechanical and interpretive peak, delivering a strong and well-motivated reading.