MUSIC REVIEWS : PIANIST SCHROEDER AT SCHOENBERG

A hidden agenda seemed to mark the uncompromising list of works Marianne Schroeder played at the Schoenberg Institute on Thursday night. Yet, the Swiss pianist’s real aims, in this program of mostly short pieces by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Wladimir Vogel, Anton Webern and Morton Feldman, never emerged clearly.

In an appearance co-sponsored by the USC-based institute and the Los Angeles branch of the Goethe Institute, Schroeder gave compelling, authoritative and thoughtful readings of three works (totaling 33 minutes of music) by Stockhausen, works placed at the beginning, the conclusion and the middle of her program.

Interspersing them with one colorful and one Spartan piece by Vogel and with Webern’s dense and dramatic Variations, Opus 27, and Feldman’s brief and neo-Impressionistic “Piano Piece” (to Philip Guston), the pianist apparently meant to make a point.

But that never happened. One appreciated Schroeder’s success in detailing each piece, in giving it shape and point, and mounting its climaxes. How all these items--written in the middle of our century, between the years 1936 and 1983--relate to each other, however, was never clarified.

In this context, the Stockhausen works--”Klavierstueck IX,” “Klavierstueck VIII” and, in its L.A. premiere, “Klavierstueck XII” (1979-83)--proved more anarchic than mediating. “Klavierstueck XII” is a 21-minute arrangement by the composer of a scene from one of his operas. One didn’t need to know that to be confused by its opaque sense of continuity, or by the vocal noises and extrapianistic sounds made by Schroeder during its over-eventful but unengrossing length.

Under the circumstances, then, the oldest work on the program, Vogel’s “Epitaffio per Alban Berg,” seemed to communicate best, with its concentrated drama, its virtuosic passages and its long and ascending line of thought. Sometimes the mainstream flows beneath an apparently dry creek.