MUSIC REVIEW : Pianist Tahmizian in a Percussive Concert

If Emma Tahmizian’s piano had been a typewriter Wednesday night in Bing Theater at the L.A. County Museum of Art, she would have knocked holes in the page.

Articulation--digital, extra firm, pointed, muscular--seemed of paramount importance to her. All else followed from that premise. She didn’t play so much as subjugate the piano, a Yamaha grand that in her virtuoso hands became a brilliant percussion instrument. Trouble is, her Pro Musicis recital included music by Scarlatti, Chopin and Schumann, who didn’t quite see it that way.

The 37-year-old Bulgarian, who since her fourth-place finish in the 1985 Van Cliburn Competition has lived in New York, took on four pieces from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” with better results. Here, her short attacks, curt rhythms and thunderous fortes captured much of the character and orchestral scope of the music, although occasionally she sounded needlessly clunky. In etudes by Debussy (“Pour les Notes Repetees”) and Ligeti (“Automne a Varsovie”) her mechanical ways were fitting to at least a large part of the material.

But she remained essentially the same pianist in everything she played--stylistic niceties be damned--so that the lyrical outpourings of Schumann (his demanding Fantasia, Opus 17) and Chopin (the Etude, Opus 10, No. 6 and the C-sharp minor Nocturne, Opus posthumous) emerged stiff and deconstructed, as if the composers had used square brackets instead of gentle curves to mark their phrases. The Scarlatti sonatas that opened the program, K. 13 and K. 513, were robotic and over-caffeinated.

Nevertheless, the Schumann--the main order of business, after all--had its thrills, largely because Tahmizian’s control of the instrument allowed her to build monumental, pounding but never brittle climaxes and to whisper and float pianissimo passages. Here, at least, we had Romantic contrast.