MUSIC REVIEW : Menahem Pressler in Biola Recital

It’s an occasion when Menahem Pressler gives a recital. The pianist, for the last 37 years a member of both the touring Beaux Arts Trio and the resident faculty at the Indiana University School of Music, brings the same musicianship, energy and virtuosity to a solo recital that he does to his other professional endeavors.

Returning to Biola University in La Mirada on Sunday,the pianist, 68, concocted, then brought off a demanding old-fashioned program.

Busoni’s sensitive transcription--that is not an oxymoron--of Bach’s chorale-prelude “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland” made a lush introduction to Mozart’s A-major Sonata, K. 331. Ravel’s “Gaspard de la Nuit” provided more contrast, before intermission. Afterward, Chopin’s B-minor Sonata scaled the heights of climax.

As it turned out, the rain-barrel acoustics of small Crowell Hall confounded most stylistic differentiations. In any case, Pressler, neither a pianissisimist nor an introvert, chose straightforwardness and stoicism as his principal emotional modes.

The result was an afternoon of direct, rather than complex, music making. Bach’s chromatic harmonies and Mozart’s pristine ones immediately began to resemble each other, especially as emerging from overpedaled piano and over-reverberant room. The aqueous beauties of Ravel’s suite then proved appropriate to both the pianist’s kaleidoscopic technical resources and the hall’s sound-mixing characteristics.

Most effective was the Chopin sonata, given a big-boned, reading, yet one not lacking in detail. Pressler achieved, without any grandstanding, the long line of the Largo as well as its smaller musical components, in a handsome unity. Unfortunately, the pianist’s firm musical and mechanical grasp of the finale was compromised by the resonant room and the often mushy-sounding instrument he played.