Music Reviews : Pianist Wolff Performs Recital at Bing Theater

Elizabeth Wolff’s piano recital in Bing Theater at the County Museum of Art mixed notions of music and poetry more effectively in Beethoven sonatas and Seymour Bernstein’s “New Pictures at an Exhibition” than in Robert Schumann’s “Kreisleriana.”

Wednesday night, following her heart more than textbook theory, Wolff showed an endearingly original way of relating the light-hearted, epigrammatic fragments of Beethoven’s Sonata, Opus 10, No. 2.

“Kreisleriana,” which followed, began alertly and deepened as the emotional rhetoric became more florid, Wolff’s virtuosity eliciting applause from the small audience at the halfway mark. As the difficult work wore on, however, Wolff’s problems with the notes, her limited dynamic and sound range and her inability to shape the passionate nature of the music had Schumann’s rambling gift for wife-to-be Clara too often faltering where it should have surged.

After intermission, with center stage occupied by slides of famous pictures by Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Watteau, Chagall, Klee, Raphael and Picasso (the grim “Guernica”) projected on a screen, Wolff played the 16-minute “New Pictures at an Exhibition,” ranging stylistically from atonal to neo-Baroque to Romantic lullaby to musical-hall comedy.

Bernstein’s modest multimedia melange, further supplemented by Owen Lewis’ delicate poems printed in the program (the house lights remained up), was unwieldy but stimulating, most effectively so in the 12-tone despair of the opening Degas and the five-minute finale set to “Guernica,” the kind of deeply felt, richly moving music common in the days before minimalists and other accessibility freaks won public favor.

The evening ended with Wolff equating Beethoven’s Opus 109 Sonata to a pool in which to gaze at gentle reflections of the soul. It was more consoling than dramatically compelling (again, not enough technique) as Beethoven’s softer spiritual side shone through the moments of sound and silence.