For most of us lucky few who attended the Sunday, April 6 recital at Le Petit Trianon Theatre, San Jose, the Russian pianist Vladimir Ovchinikov enjoyed some prior repute only from two EMI CD’s of music by Liszt and Rachmaninov. Seeing and hearing him in person under the aegis of the Steinway Society the Bay Area, however, marks another experience entirely, rather like witnessing a tall, lean figure transform into a keyboard volcano, a colossal reaper of emotional whirlwinds and hurler of musical thunderbolts.

Sporting the rubric “Songs and Dances,” Ovchinnikov opened with Schubert’s tender Sonata in A Major, D. 664, a work that consistently ingratiates through its almost pre-Classical, crystalline purity of expression, its ingenuous harmonic syntax, and its rhythmic colorations. Ovchinnikov imposed a pearly iridescence on this music, as he would later pour Greek fire on his Russians, but always the soul of refined clarity, no matter the passion. If the second movement heralded something of Grieg’s folkish modalities, the last movement waxed bravura in scope and rhythmic articulation, the syncopations and ample scale passages thrown off in virtuoso fashion.

If Schubert gives us music from the Heart, the Scriabin Sonata No. 5 gives us music from the primordial Id, Wagner’s Tristan cross-fertilized by Russian mysticism in the form of intervals all based on fourths. Cast in one febrile movement, the music alternately convulsed and sang a kind of death-song, as if D.H. Lawrence were composing one of his erotic poems before us. Maybe this piece is Scriabin’s version of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Ovchinnikov rendered this music with frightful acuity, a driving, punishing force of nature, shorn of anything like bourgeois respectability. Along with such acolytes as Richter, Covelli, and Barere, Ovchinnikov must stand as a major interpreter of this often disturbed, diabolical music, to which Rachmaninov once replied, “I felt as if I had been beaten with sticks.”

Speak of the Devil: the nostalgic master, Rachmaninov, found representation in this recital with the first four of his Op. 16 Moments Musicaux. Here mysticism is tempered by wistfulness, the idols being Chopin and occasionally
Liszt.

The E-flat Minor might have been conceived as an answer to Chopin’s G-flat “Black Key” Etude. Intimate, wide-spanned, melodic, and eminently pianistic, several pieces--especially the B Minor--evoked the spirit of Chopin’s D-flat Berceuse. Ovchinnikov’s application of the Russian palette proved apt and piquant at once. The more erotic of the pieces could be no less sensuous than Scriabin, but infinitely more accessible to the conservative tastes. No. 4 in E Minor provided Ovchinnikov another of those moto perpetuo opportunities to demonstrate his uncanny, fluid prowess in music of knotty metric tissue.

The second half opened with national danced music by the mighty pedagogue Nicolai Rubinstein (1835-1881), whom Tchaikovsky celebrated in his famous Trio in A Minor.

While the Mazurka in F, Op. 11 and the E-flat Major Polka, Op. 15 were playful, formulaic, studied salon works--the Polka much in the mode of a Smetana offering in the same genre--it was the Tarantella in G Minor, Op. 14 that made a minor sensation, a whirl of Neapolitan color that hinted at Rossini’s La Danza and Liszt’s Venezia e Napoli. Then followed three piano reductions from Prokofiev’s Cinderella ballet, Op. 87--Valse lente, Cinderella and the Prince, and Cinderella’s Departure from the Ball--allowing Ovchinnikovs sotto voce free play, a modal, angular sense of lyric childhood, the last waltz rife with lilted melancholy. The wonderful facility Ovchinnikov evinced in these renditions had many us coveting his way with the composer’s piano arrangements of his own Romeo and Juliet as Op. 75. Lastly, Percy Grainger’s arrangement of the most perennial of all Tchikovsky offerings, the Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker. In as transcription worthy of Liszt (who only arranged one piece--the Polonaise from Evgeny Onegin), Grainger employed any number of polyphonic layers to achieve a thick brew from the easy rotations of the theme, until Leopold Godowsky himself might have envied the swirling mix. No small chuckle from those auditors who could hear Tchaikovsky’s own B-flat Minor Concerto riffs emerging from the heady morass.

Ovchinnikov, in answer to a virtual barrage of applause, graced us with two more moments of Rachmaninov: the ever-so-elusive Lilacs, Op. 38 and the Polka de W.R., the latter an homage to the composer’s father. A poised leisure suffused both encores, a virtuoso pianist exercising his peerless technique in repertory close to head and heart, sustained by fingers most dextrous.