Spheres Program Is Rarely Easy, Often Intriguing

The brave, high-minded Piano Spheres series in Pasadena’s woodsy Neighborhood Church completed its sixth season Friday night--and judging from its plans to commission new works and to incorporate, it intends to continue. Like any series that focuses on new music, though, the journey of discovery is often hit and miss; you’re grateful for the opportunity to hear new things, if not always satisfied by the results.

In his season-ending program titled “Sonatas and Interludes,” Mark Robson displayed plenty of technical firepower for fire-eating contemporary music, yet he was most expressive when applying a delicate, floating touch. Opening with Busoni’s mostly melancholy “Sonatina in diem nativitatis Christi,” Robson linked this piece with a fluttering Prelude by Richard Felciano and the forbidding, icicle-laden Piano Sonata of James MacMillan. This was clever programming, for all three pieces seemed to operate on similar schemes--with gusts of agitation and fission interrupting predominantly austere landscapes--yet none really touched this listener very deeply.

Galina Ustvolskaya’s Sonata No. 4 was another fairly wintry piece of music, with blunt, bludgeon-like, quintessentially Russian-sounding passages framed by desolation reminiscent of her teacher Shostakovich. But then, Robson provided some relief with a floating, perfumed, enigmatic interlude by Takemitsu, “Rain Tree Sketch.”

If not exactly everyday repertoire, the concluding Prokofiev Sonata No. 4 was easily the best-known--and most substantial--piece on the program. Robson chose to blur its emotional extremes at first, using the sustaining pedal on his Steinway quite liberally in the first movement, while conserving his energy for a big, bravura finish.

He added a graceful performance of the Andante from Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 8 as an encore.