On Piano, Formenti Sets Off to Explore the Heavens and Earth

Look out, Marino Formenti is back!

Last season, for his first solo engagements in America, the dazzling young Italian pianist presented a momentous four-concert survey of modern music as part of the Monday Evening Concerts series at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. This year, Formenti has a new festival of three concerts that, over the course of a week, look at early, middle and late 20th century music. He has divided his programs into “The Gods,” “The Heroes” and “The Men,” taking his notion from the three ages of ancient Greek tragedy, which was said to have begun in the heavens and gradually moved down to earth.

Monday night was theoi, the gods, who were in operation between 1907 and 1924. But Formenti’s gods are not everyone’s. He found the roots of 20th century piano music in none of the usual places--not in Paris, Berlin, Vienna or New Orleans--but in Revolutionary Russia.

The earliest work was Scriabin’s Fifth Sonata, which was written in a mystic trance over a couple of demonic days as a rite of bringing voice to the composer’s ecstatic subconscious. It is a Freudian treasure trove of erupting trills and tremolos, punctuated by erotic sighs and cabalistic chords, and it is written for a pianist with a monstrous physical technique.

The sonata was preceded by two other weird Russian pieces, these by obscure composers who had been caught up in the fervor of the 1917 Revolution and the flamboyant new movements of Futurism, Suprematism and Constructivism. The small movements in Arthur Lourie’s “Syntheses” are Constructivist experiments, made of disjointed gestures, be they violent percussive attacks or dainty little mouse steps up the keys. Nikolai Roslavet’s Five Preludes, on the other hand, are studies in sonority, their moody dissonance indebted to Scriabin.

After intermission, Formenti was on somewhat firmer historical ground. Hanns Eisler’s First Sonata demonstrated the latest thinking in Berlin in 1922, where there was a desire to fit intense chromaticism and angry Expressionism into accessible musical structures, such as sonata form or passacaglia. Bartok’s Suite, Opus 14, applied percussive modern piano techniques to folk material. Schoenberg ended his Five Piano Pieces, Opus 23, with a waltz that introduces his 12-tone method. That waltz also ended the program, as if the gods had finally put an end to all those spiritually inchoate Russian stirrings by sending down the law.

But it didn’t quite sound that way on Monday. Formenti is a modern pianist who, when stepping back in time, has no intention of becoming part of history. He plays everything his way. Dynamics, tempo markings and other indications by the composers are not, for him, taken as literal instructions. He loves the extremes of dramatic contrasts and a favorite trick is to float the quietest imaginable pianissimo into space and then break the mood with a startlingly ferocious attack on the keyboard. It is hard to say which is more riveting, his poetic legato lines or his rhythmic power.

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In Scriabin, he was magnificent. And there are not many pianists who can create a mesmerizing spell or find bracing drama in Schoenberg’s most formalistic music the way Formenti can, even if that may not be exactly what Schoenberg had on his mind. But the listener must accept Formenti on his own terms, and those terms encompass the most advanced and spectacularly theatrical piano music of our day, the music that Formenti lives and breathes.

Monday Evening Concerts is to be congratulated for giving this kind of forum to Formenti, who is still unknown (not for long, surely) in the rest of this country. It also draws, for him, an unusually large and enthusiastic audience worth cultivating with program notes properly edited and proofread.

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* Marino Formenti works his way through the rest of the 20th century in two remaining programs, Thursday and Monday, 8 p.m., Leo S. Bing Theater, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. $5-$15. (323) 857-6010.