Pianist Lugansky Plays Up Technical Skills Over Emotion

Strong, personable and fleet of finger, pianist Nikolai Lugansky in four previous Southern California appearances--mostly playing concertos with orchestras--has impressed with his confident virtuosity and good musical manners.

At his first local recital, however, Monday night on the highly regarded Jose Iturbi Gold Medal series at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts, Lugansky disappointed.

His technique operates with great ease, and he gets around the keyboard with an accuracy that is almost frightening--at any speed, he seems never to play the wrong note--but the music he makes seldom becomes compelling. And, for all his note-perfect playing, he does not touch the listener’s imagination.

Throughout the program--Mozart’s Sonata in D, K. 576, Rachmaninoff’s “Moments Musicaux,” Opus 16, three excerpts from Nikolai Medtner’s “Vergessene Weisen” and Mikhail Pletnev’s transcription of a suite from Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty” ballet--one waited in vain for changing moods, emotional contrasts, injections of color into passages of quick notes. The sonata turned into a plain-vanilla Mozart milkshake, its musical edges blunted, its ebullience mechanical. Rachmaninoff’s early but promising character pieces lacked both thrills and longing. Tchaikovsky’s irrepressible ballet score emerged clean but undetailed emotionally.

A little heat warmed up the neo-Romantic exoticisms of Medtner’s “Forgotten Melodies,” but not enough to start a fire.

The good news: A large audience measured by the management at 70% of capacity listened attentively, though it insisted on applauding at every cadence. Still, its enthusiasm promises much for this series.