Barenboim Gives a Piano Recital of Rare Eloquence

Twenty-one years after his last Southern California appearance as a pianist--he has been mightily, internationally visible as a major and controversial conductor since then--Daniel Barenboim returned in recital Saturday night.

The place was the commodious, still-palatial-after-all-these-years Copley Symphony Hall in downtown San Diego, the program a provocative mix of Liszt and Albeniz, the audience respectful. This low-energy gathering of listeners could have had more than the two short encores Barenboim offered, but seemed in a hurry to leave.

That was a pity. What Barenboim accomplished were unusually probing, effortlessly virtuosic, often exquisite, thoughtfully eloquent performances of unhackneyed but important music. One seldom comes away from a piano recital so exhilarated and engaged.

The way the 57-year-old musician plays the piano is singular. His technique, solid and ingrained, seldom shows its seams or the effort it has taken to amass its virtues. His tone is edgeless, his dynamics broad, his colors resourceful, his authority at the keyboard complete but understated.

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He commands every detail and nuance, yet he indulges no fussiness. Music emerges from his piano naturally, articulately, without self-consciousness.

The poetic directness in the opening Liszt group, consisting of the “Sonetti del Petrarca” Nos. 47, 104 and 123 and the “Dante” Sonata, took the breath away.

The Sonnets sang forth in simple but detailed beauties. The Sonata, which in most other hands can be bombastic, overbearing and/or banal, this time came out thoughtful, well-considered, yet visceral in its charms--the excitement, in the rush of all those octaves and chordal perorations, still present. For once, the familiar work seemed stripped of its usual vulgarity.

In two (of the four) books of Albeniz’s “Iberia,” Barenboim delivered both the outer charms and the inner workings of the composer’s evocation of Spanish pride and poetry. With complete focus and undeterred musicality, the pianist reproduced the essence of this masterly music, the qualities of both languor and precision.

The sounds were seductive, the narratives compelling, the action irresistible. For comparisons, one has to go back to the heydays of the great Spanish pianists Amparo Iturbi and Alicia de Larrocha to describe the poise, the atmosphere, the unforced beauties of these performances.

Choosing to remain on the Iberian peninsula, Barenboim offered as his first encore a sonata in D minor of Domenico Scarlatti, who wrote most of his hundreds of sonatas in that place.