Ohlsson Divines Chopin’s Moods

While it wouldn’t be fair to tag Garrick Ohlsson as a Chopin specialist--his repertory and sympathies are too wide for that--he has not exactly discouraged it, having spent a good deal of the 1990s performing complete cycles of the composer’s solo piano music. And Chopin--and nothing but Chopin--was what Ohlsson brought to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion Tuesday night, replacing the duo of Martha Argerich and Nelson Freire, who canceled their tour last fall, on the Philharmonic’s Celebrity Recital Series.

Ohlsson cut a wide path through a slew of Chopin genres--taking in the five Opus 7 Mazurkas; six Etudes from Opus 25; the comparatively rare Introduction and Rondo, Opus 16; the Prelude in C sharp minor, Opus 45; and Ballade in A flat; with the Sonata No. 3 acting as an anchor. He seemed to gear his interpretive approach toward a peak of extroversion down the stretch, culminating in the splashy fireworks of the close of the Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise, with three of Chopin’s best-known waltzes (in E flat, C sharp minor, and the D-flat “Minute Waltz”) for dessert.

Perhaps with this pacing in mind, the Sonata, placed early in the program’s first half, received a mostly restrained, overly contemplative performance--it needed more turbulence--and the rhythms of the Mazurkas were too willfully distorted. Yet in the Introduction and Rondo after intermission, Ohlsson’s playing took on a clarity and force that had been lacking previously, and he arrived at the peak of his powers in the Etudes, with a beautifully shaded, exquisitely light-fingered treatment of what program annotator Orrin Howard puckishly calls “those damnable thirds.” From this point onward, Ohlsson could do no wrong; his Andante Spianato was a poised beauty, with just the right touch of rubato, and the waltzes had freedom, delicacy and even good humor.