Van Gogh-Themed Program by Dutch Pianist Mixes Its Tones

“Van Gogh’s Van Goghs” is on exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and all the town seems Vincent-drenched. Wednesday, in a special program in the Bing Theater of LACMA, it was music’s turn.

An enterprising Dutch pianist, Marcel Worms, who has thought also about Mondrian and Picasso in musical terms, has devised a fascinating program that explores Van Gogh through the music that might have inspired the painter and was inspired by him; through--music that he might have heard or responded to.

Still, nothing seemed quite strong enough to call forth in sound a glimpse of the fiery paintings in the neighboring gallery. During his Paris days in the 1880s, for instance, Van Gogh may very well have wandered into the Montmartre cabaret Chat Noir when Satie was at the piano. Yet the two early waltzes Worms chose didn’t tell us very much about either composer or painter. Likewise, it is hard to find the Impressionist side of Van Gogh in a very early Debussy nocturne, again a work in which that composer’s personality is not yet realized.

Other connections were downright fanciful. Scriabin and Van Gogh were both synesthetic, relating colors with specific tones (though not necessarily the same ones), but the early hothouse mazurkas and preludes seemed once more chosen by date, not content. Late Liszt was invited for reasons of their shared epilepsy and angst; Chabrier and Milhaud were paraded as composers with a fondness for French landscape, however irrelevant their easygoing musical styles.

A piano transcription of the Prelude to “Tristan und Isolde” represented Van Gogh’s own obsession with Wagner. Finally, Fre Focke’s “Le Tombeau de Van Gogh,” written by a homesick Dutch composer in Chile in 1951, offered sonic miniatures of 20 paintings, but with such gray harmonies the works seemed reproduced in black-and-white.

Worms is a pianist with a restless imagination--he seems to be embarked on endless worthy projects, ranging from reviving neglected 20th century composers to doing an international survey of the world of blues. He is less a pianist, though, of persuasive fingers. Perhaps Van Gogh himself would have peeked through the sonic zeitgeist were the playing more vibrant, were the very different, even conflicting, musics not phrased so similarly.

* Marcel Worms will play blues tonight at 7, Rocco Ristorante, 2930 Beverly Glen Circle, Bel-Air; $15, (310) 475-9807.