THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR « THURSDAY. FEBRUARY 3,
,1994
CONCERT REVIEW
Padilla balances words and music well
Anthony Padilla
•±-±-±■1/9 Where: DeBoest
^ ^ ^ /£- Lecture Hall, Indianapolis Museum of Art.
When: 2 p.m. Sunday.
Tickets: Free.
Star ratings: 4 excellent, 3 good, 2 fair, 1 poor.
By Jay Harvey
STAR STAFF WRITER
The implied casual quality of
the lunchtime PianoFest series, which the American Pianists Association presents from
time to time in the Circle Theatre's
Wood Room, brings different responses from different pianists.
Some of the Beethoven Fellows
the series presents ignore the opportunity to be informal, and
plunge ahead without a word.
Fewer talk too much or too uneasily-
Anthony Padilla, a 1991 winner
of the fellowship, found the right
course with oral program notes
that were informative and to the
point. More important, however,
was the intensity and thorough
preparation with which Padilla ap-
INFORM ATI VE: Anthony Pa-
dilla's oral program notes
made his energetic PianoFest
concert even better.
proached the music itself.
The hour-long program drew on
immense reserves of energy,
which the recitalist was always
able to supply. Taken together the
music was short on charm,
though Padilla took pains to inject
some whenever he got the chance.
Fantasies and machismo
The program was notable for a
striking touch of programming —
following Busoni's Turandots
Frauengemach (Fantasy on
Greensleeves) with Liszt's Tran-
scendental Etude No 7 (Eroica).
The florid Busoni work was complemented by the machismo of the
Liszt piece. Padilla seemed to be
portraying an actual general on
horseback; some performances
settle for park statuary.
He opened with a late, obscure
Schumann work, Three Fantasy
Pieces, Opus 111. The stormy first
piece is unusually directionless,
even for Schumann. The second
has an attractive melody — it
would make a good serenade for a
lyric tenor — surrounding a contrasting middle section that comes
out of nowhere and vanishes just
as gratuitously.
The final piece is the best, a
vigorous march that Padilla unified with sonorously accented left-
hand playing. The strange harmonies in the middle section were
nirHv rolnred.
• Two Chopin Etudes illustrated
more successful ways of making
middle sections contrast with, yet
complement, the main material.
Padilla displayed a stunning/ortis-
simo that never banged and a
flawless octave technique in
Etude in E minor. Opus 25, No. 5.
Tapestry of emotion
The slender pianist, aptly clad
in a loosely fitted, Byronic white
shirt, closed the program with
Beethoven's Sonata in E-flat major. Opus 81a.
A favorite patron is bidden farewell in the first movement, his
absence deeply felt in the second.
In the third, his return to Vienna
is celebrated rapturously.
A more caressing tone would
have been welcome in the second
movement, but the pianist articulated everything well throughout.
He also never missed a chance to
trace the vivid tapestry of emotion
the sonata weaves.
Padilla will offer a different, full-
length program in his final Indianapolis appearance as a Beethoven Fellow at the Indianapolis
Museum of Art Sunday afternoon.
