Van Ness Opens List-Glenn Fest With a Mixed Recital Program

Paul Van Ness, founder of the 14-year-old List-Glenn Institute for Piano & Strings, commenced that organization’s sixth festival of summer concerts and master classes Monday night, playing a provocative recital of works by Ravel, Leslie Bassett, Debussy and Chopin.

Honoring the late American pianist Eugene List and violinist Carroll Glenn, the institute carries on those players’ ideals of aggressive eclecticism and high musical standards. As the first of five international pianists on the current teaching and performing roster--which ends July 2 with an appearance by Polish musician Slawomir Dobrzanski--Van Ness fanned the flame in his performance in the Music Hall at Cal State Los Angeles.

He succeeded most winningly at both ends of his program, in Ravel’s exposed “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales” and Chopin’s beloved Barcarolle, Opus 60. In the former, Van Ness convincingly projected the composer’s kaleidoscopic vision of kinetic activity through a controlled haze of pianistic textures and details. In the Barcarolle, he captured the flow of the work and laid out its progress apprehensibly and handsomely.

He couldn’t convince the listener of the musical worth of Bassett’s “Elaborations” (1965), but that was mostly the fault of the dissonant, clangorous set of four disagreeable miniatures. Van Ness then proved himself to be more a literalist than an impressionist in laying out the colorful profiles of Debussy’s three “Estampes.”

He didn’t shrink from the technical challenges in eight of Chopin’s 24 Preludes but turned them into a mixed bag rather than a many-faceted whole. And his performance of the F-minor Fantasy emerged splintered and unintegrated, a modicum of pianistic passion notwithstanding.

*

* The 1999 List-Glenn recital series continues with Neal Larrabee, Thursday, 8 p.m.; Thomas Otten, Sunday, 4 p.m.; Bulgarian Elena Paralingova in her U.S. debut, June 30, 8 p.m.; and Dobrzanski, July 2, 8 p.m. Two student concerts will be given, Friday and July 7, both at 8 p.m. Cal State Los Angeles Music Hall, 5151 State University Drive, $10-$15. (323) 343-4091.