Pianist Simon Reflects on Familiar Fare

Anyone who collected those handy, inexpensive Vox boxes in the LP era will have a soft spot for pianist Abbey Simon, who recorded acres of repertory for those who couldn’t afford records by, say, Rubinstein or Ashkenazy. Many of those recordings are still available on low-priced CDs, serving the same purpose now as then--and Simon, 80 this year, is still quite active, stopping in at Pepperdine University’s Raitt Recital Hall on Sunday afternoon.

The aura Simon generated on this day was that of the experienced old master ruminating over mostly mainstream music without much rhythmic drive or dynamic contrast, humming and moaning audibly (shades of Glenn Gould) along with his playing. Beethoven’s Sonata No. 31 in A flat, Opus 110, emerged in rather stolid, opaque-toned, granitic fashion; Schumann’s sprawling “Kreisleriana” was a somewhat inward-looking, rambling affair with lots of rubato and not nearly enough galloping momentum in the final light-footed section. Similarly, the brief Prokofiev Sonata No. 3 could have used more drive, but this performance had some welcome flashes of temperament.

When Simon turned to Chopin, a pair of mazurkas in A minor and C and the Scherzo No. 4, it was hard to feel the rhythm in his left hand but easy to enjoy the free-flowing, at times impulsive, brilliance of his right hand. And he generously provided four encores, including a fancy parting display of dexterity in “The Flight of the Bumble Bee.”