Taub Meets Challenges With Passion, Grace

A noted Beethovenian and an ardent champion of contemporary American music, pianist Robert Taub set himself some repertory challenges Friday at Marsee Auditorium of El Camino College. There was a precise mind and clarifying spirit at work in his compact, keyboard hero’s program, but the physical confrontation with the notes proved less tidy.

Which is not to say that his performances were dispassionate or shoddy. Emotion was abundant in his playing of Chopin’s B-minor Sonata, but never at the expense of elegance or coherence. Taub found a noble, lyrical core to everything, projected with buoyant, almost Mozartean grace.

Bach’s “Italian Concerto” demonstrated Taub’s stylistic taste and good sense, fully informed about period niceties but unapologetic about being articulated on a piano. The piece seemed to set him in a monochrome frame of mind, however, which gave the macabre scenes of Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit” a dark, savagely observed horror. There was ice in the waters of “Ondine,” unrepressed mania in the obsessive tolling of “Le Gibet,” and mercurial malevolence in “Scarbo.”

Taub’s generous encores maintained the recital’s exacting technical and interpretive levels: a wild ride through Liszt’s “La Campanella” Etude and a crisply detailed Scarlatti Sonata.