Markovich Plays Rach 13 at LACMA

Alexander Markovich plays loud and soft, heavy and light, but his pianism for the most part lacks color, eloquence and subtlety.

At his all-Rachmaninoff recital in Leo Bing Theater at the L.A. County Museum of Art Wednesday night, the 34-year-old Russian pianist indicated the breadth of the composer’s solo-keyboard works but not the emotional and artistic intricacies of its style.

While playing all the notes in a grandstanding, improvisatory style, he regularly delivered a full range of dynamics but very few of the details and nuances to document the whims and kaleidoscopic emotions in this collection of pieces. And his brittle, hard tone remained monochromatic at all levels of loudness and quiet.

Markovich had planned a program of 23 items, but he wisely downsized it to a more manageable 13. And as a program, it worked: It began with the most famous of all Rachmaninoff pieces, the now seldom-heard C-sharp minor Prelude, then offered five of the “Etudes-Tableaux” of Opus 33 and two of those from Opus 39. After intermission, there were four of the Preludes from Opus 23, ending with the best-known one, in G minor; the closer was the Prelude in G-sharp minor from Opus 32.

An enthusiastic audience peppered with Russians and salted with pianists greeted Markovich vociferously between each of the individual pieces and at the end.