Pianist Ju-Ying Song Honors Bach in Recital

The international Pro Musicis series used to do business at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but now it has joined the rush of organizations that use the Colburn School’s comfortable new Zipper Concert Hall downtown. According to Pro Musicis’ 2000 schedule, Taiwan-born pianist Ju-Ying Song--billed as J.Y. Song--is the only artist who is making multiple appearances on the series, following her recital here Friday night with repeat performances in Cambridge, Mass., and New York in March.

Mindful of the 250th anniversary of J.S. Bach’s death, Song came up with an informal, arching concept called “Everything but Bach,” even concocting a breezy set of program notes to set the mood. The idea was to follow the appropriation and transfiguration of Bach’s techniques, from outright transcription (Ferruccio Busoni’s arrangement of Bach’s chorale-prelude “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr”) through Busoni’s amalgam of Romantic rhetoric and Bachian cadences (“Fantasia nach J.S. Bach”), the less obviously influenced Chopin Sonata No. 3 in B minor and one of the more Baroque-flavored entries (No. 4) in Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras series.

And Song’s theme of unity did not stop there. The Bach, Busoni and Chopin pieces in the first half were played as if they were one long composition, in the same drifting, floating, seamless, almost trance-like manner--alas, Chopin was sometimes allowed to drift much too expansively--with one piece seeming to emerge as if in a dream from the previous one.

For some reason, Song played only three of the Bachianas Brasileiras’ four movements, omitting the second--and while her playing was more forthright, it lacked definition; her heavy pedaling made a shapeless blur of the syncopation in the third movement. Finally, breaking off the Bach concept and extending the Villa-Lobos theme, the latter’s rough-hewn showpiece, “Rudepoema,” at last brought out some temperament and fire in Song.

In a nutshell, you could admire, even bathe in, the super-polished surface of Song’s playing and her discipline in maintaining the conceptual line while becoming a bit impatient with some of the parts within the whole.