Playing With Keyboard History

A test: Read only the list of scheduled pieces for a piano recital taking place in a chandelier-filled emporium and try to guess who is about to play them.

Hard to do, because most A-circuit pianists luxuriate in the standard repertory, and one program can look pretty much like another.

Then there’s Peter Serkin, that rare figure equally dedicated to music of the past and the present. The 51-year-old virtuoso, who plays Thursday night at Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, will give a recital bookended by Mozart and Beethoven but generously studded with contemporary music by Olivier Messiaen, Gyorgy Kurtag, George Benjamin and Arnold Schoenberg.

And although the last thing this mild-mannered musician would do is deliberately carve out an identifying niche--he’s much too humble and unflamboyant for that--Serkin resists the usual recital format.

“Even more difficult to resist,” he said by phone recently fromhis New York apartment on the Upper West Side, “are the initial protests of concert presenters, many of whom project their own fears of how audiences might react to something unfamiliar and new. The happy outcome, though, is that those fears are often dispelled at the moment of performance.”

Serkin said that while his typical program list may look forbidding--all those composers with unrecognizable names--the pieces are brief, some less than a minute long.

“At any rate,” he said, “I try to work with the music business and its prejudices, not butt up against it--doing so, perhaps, in a slightly subversive way.”

This isn’t new for the son of famed pianist Rudolf Serkin. The young Serkin took astand for atonal music from a very early age, against objections of his father, who wanted the boy to be grounded in the classics first. At age 12, the prodigy, who had already made his New York debut, loved listening to Schoenberg quartets and learned a difficult work by Leon Kirchner.

By the time Serkin reached his teens, “we had many clashes,” he said, “of the natural kind that happen between fathers and sons who are struggling for independence.”

During the ‘60s--Serkin’s coming of age (amid the culture of love beads and sandals)--Serkin took off a year to travel in Mexico. After his return, he co-founded Tashi, an upstart chamber group. But for the last three decades Serkin has carried on the family tradition of music scholarship, teaching (at Juilliard and Tanglewood) and, of course, concertizing and recording.

Rudolf Serkin, who died in 1991, brought that tradition with him when he immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1929 with his wife, her mother and father, violinist Adolph Busch.

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“It was well before the Nazis were absolutely established,” Peter Serkin said, “that my family saw the heel of Hitler coming down. My grandfather denounced what was happening in the strongest terms. It made quite a scandal in the newspapers.

“Because the [Dresden] opera company did not want to see him and his brother, Fritz, leave, the government offered to declare my father, who was Jewish, an ‘honorary Aryan.’ But leaving was a necessity,” Serkin said, “because even if they could have stayed and survived prosperously, they didn’t want any part of it. I respect them for that.”

Indeed, the Serkins represent musicians as a most humane breed. It’s implicit in their mentoring and fostering of such enterprises as the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont, which Rudolf founded, and in the spirit of honoring music, which Peter carries on.

It’s a value he tries to instill in his four children, age 10 and younger, with his current wife, plus a 27-year-old daughter from his first marriage.

“They may not choose to be musicians,” he said, “and that’s fine. But I think of music as being part of one’s education, so at least they should know how to play a little.

“My son sometimes rebels,” Serkin added, “saying, ‘This is your thing, not mine. I’m interested in baseball, so don’t force it on me.’ ”

Serkin’s own experience in family musicales--he once conducted the Marlboro Festival Orchestra, with his father as soloist in Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, and was “thrilled” by it--has given him “a sense of joy and sharing. There’s something so natural about getting together and playing.”

As for Peter Serkin, the concert performer, the exhibitionism doesn’t faze him.

“What I am in awe of,” he said, having just come from a long rehearsal session, “is the music. It’s humbling to have this privilege of offering it to the public yet sometimes painful and difficult because of feeling inadequate to it. Like the Bach--that I must get back to right now,” he said. “I struggle to play it not only properly but in some meaningful way.”

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* Pianist Peter Serkin plays Thursday in Founders Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. 8 p.m. $30. (714) 556-2787.