PIANIST KUHN ZIPS INTO THE BEVERLY

Speed was the operative word for pianist Joachim Kuhn’s music Sunday night at the Beverly Theatre. A classically trained pianist, a well-known European jazz performer for the last 20 years and a keyboard player with a variety of rock groups, Kuhn has the skills to cover a broad range of musical activities.

He also has an obsessive fascination with rapid playing. There were few moments in his 90-minute program in which his right hand was not jitterbugging through waves of 32nd notes.

Disdaining the opportunity to let the audience in on the name or the source of his material, Kuhn simply sat at the piano and roared through five or six unstructured-sounding pieces that appeared to be improvisational impromptus.

Moments of restless cannonading were reminiscent of Cecil Taylor’s blocks of sound; more lyrical episodes recalled Keith Jarrett’s finely woven lines. But Kuhn replaced the blues and jazz foundation underlying Taylor’s and Jarrett’s music with a grab-bag collection of classical techniques--fragments of Bergian pointillism, swirls of Impressionistic harmonies, disjunct Stravinsky-like rhythms.

And always, regardless of either the intensity or the gentleness of the moment, there was a relentless filigree of notes.

It was impossible not to admire Kuhn’s obviously high-level pianistic skills, as well as his academic familiarity with European music. But his jazz abilities, much touted in Europe, were virtually unheard here. Most of all, one wondered where, beneath all this blizzard of frenetic activity, was the real player.