Creativity is right at their fingertips

I grew up in an era of great pianists. My favorites were Glenn Gould, Sviatoslav Richter, Arthur Rubinstein, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and David Tudor. I avidly followed their careers. I did whatever it took to obtain their recordings the moment they came out and to hear them live. We may never again see the like of these individual and gripping artists. My tastes were molded by them. I miss them. But I don’t need them, as I have been reminded lately by a new generation of remarkable pianists.

Maybe Krystian Zimerman at the Irvine Barclay Theatre and Marino Formenti -- who threw a marathon “piano party” Monday night in and around the Bing Theater for the last Monday Evening Concert at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art -- didn’t altogether reinvent the piano recital, but they came enthrallingly close. Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who recently played Brahms’ First Piano Concerto with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, startlingly cut the crust off a crusty masterpiece. Tonight, another bright star in the firmament of young (i.e., under 50) pianists, Leif Ove Andsnes, is scheduled to give an intriguing joint recital with the British tenor Ian Bostridge at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Although these are four radically different sorts of pianists, it is possible to roughly divide them into two categories. Zimerman (a Pole) and Formenti (an Italian) have the flamboyance of romantic artists who can make you believe that they are making up music on the spot. Aimard (who is French) and Andsnes (from Norway) appear to take a more analytic approach.

But appearances are deceptive. No musician is more painstakingly thorough than Zimerman. He goes to the trouble of dragging his piano along with him wherever he plays. No matter the airport security hassles, he wants to make sure he can regulate his instrument to accommodate the acoustics he encounters, and the music, as much as possible.

He is just as methodical in his musical research and analyses. He leaves little to chance until he sits down to play, and then he appears to give himself up to the power of impulse. During a popular Mozart sonata in Irvine, for instance, his left hand, when not otherwise occupied, conducted his right hand, urging it on to greater and greater expression.

The flamboyant Formenti really did seem to be making it all up for Monday’s “party,” which lasted 4 1/2 hours. But of course he wasn’t. He surveyed the history of the Monday Evening Concerts. The music of Ives, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and Henry Cowell appeared on this historically significant series when it was new. Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage and Elliott Carter were also on the program. Formenti scurried like a spider along the keyboard in Salvatore Sciarrino’s Notturno No. 1 (from 1998).

The concert had three intermissions, with complimentary crudites, dessert and wine outdoors. The pianist socialized in the courtyard and invited members of the audience to help him perform Cage’s “Fontana Mix” on six boomboxes playing Stravinsky (even though Cage sided with Schoenberg in the great midcentury musical divide). When he dragged a violin along the ground and around the courtyard like a dog on a leash, that was a piece by Nam June Paik. He ended with a beautifully serene 25-minute performance of Morton Feldman’s last work, “Palais de Mari.” He invited members of the audience to join him onstage, sit on the floor, lie under the piano, get as close to this otherworldly music as possible. Watching him up close, it was obvious that there was nothing even slightly casual about the control he sustained in barely audible playing.

Aimard and Andsnes have more Northern personalities. They are less demonstrative at the keyboard. But they are spectacular players who scrub away layers of tradition.

Aimard was once known as a new music specialist, but no more. Now he plays everything. So does Andsnes, who has added more and more modern music to his repertory as he has become better known.

Both of them, moreover, have their individually creative approaches to programming. Aimard runs festivals in Europe. Next season he will become an artistic partner of the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and will be the music director of the 2007 Ojai Festival. Andsnes hosts a summer chamber music festival in Norway, and his concert tonight is part of his Los Angeles Philharmonic On Location residency. Both he and Aimard have been curating series at Carnegie Hall as well. If anything can be said with certainty about these various series, it is that they are unpredictably eclectic (although tonight Andsnes will stick with Beethoven and Schubert).

Such aggressive creativity is ultimately what gives all these pianists their exceptional vitality. That vitality is no longer just about playing the piano spectacularly well, which all four do. It is about taking nothing for granted. The rules are flexible -- about what music works with what, about how much distance a performer needs from his or her audience, about what you can do to a piece of music to make it your own.

The job of a great artist is to show you something in the world around you that you might otherwise have missed. When contemporary artists fail, we become nostalgic for the past. Here are four pianists who make me long for no other time than the present.