Navah Perlman: Romance at Heart of Varied Program

We last heard Navah Perlman at Pepperdine University two years ago, in a piano trio with violinist Kurt Nikkanen and cellist Zuill Bailey, and the pianist--Itzhak’s daughter--showed a refinement and dynamism that swiftly allayed any suspicions of nepotism in action. We wanted to hear more.

She made good on her promise in a solo recital Sunday afternoon. In Pepperdine’s invitingly intimate Raitt Recital Hall, Perlman presented a varied, well-balanced menu, revealing her own musical proclivities along the way. Generous helpings of Romantic music were at the core. She showed greatest fluency with Schumann’s Piano Sonata No. 2, with its tender Andantino savored as a moment amid the tempestuous fistfuls of the other movements, and four pieces by Chopin, closing the recital.

But Perlman’s programming extended beyond her most comfortable milieu. Romanticism once or twice removed is the subject of John Corigliano’s 1985 piece “Fantasia on an Ostinato.” A vaguely Minimalist deconstruction of the second-movement theme from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the music goes amiably adrift before its memorable climax, in which the original theme, in the left hand, contrasts with abstract musings in the right. Ultimately, it’s more of an intriguing experiment than an involving listening experience.

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Bach’s Toccata in C Minor, BWV 911 emerged fortified with a gushing romantic spirit, sometimes overpowering precision and clarity. Copland’s “Four Piano Blues,” four short works of various vintages pulled together in 1949, is only tangentially about the blues as we know it. In Perlman’s hands, the blues elements were further distanced, and she played up the music’s Satie-esque quality, where impish wit and daydreaming introspection meld.

Some fuzzy execution notwithstanding, Perlman impressed with her sense of technical gifts and emotional commitment. She’s a romantic by instinct, but one with an open mind.