Sometimes a concert appearance by a young artist results from winning a competition. Mostly, though, artists are engaged because the director of a hall is interested.
For a fresh twist on programming, the 92nd Street Y in conjunction with SubCulture, the popular basement performance space in the East Village, asked the eminent pianist Andras Schiff to select three emerging pianists in the vanguard of a new generation.
On Monday night at SubCulture, for the second recital in the series, the impressive Israeli pianist Roman Rabinovich, born in 1985 in Uzbekistan, played an 80-minute program without intermission, a thoughtful selection of works by Bach, Brahms, Bartok and Smetana that explore elements of dance and folk music. Mr. Rabinovich came to attention in 2008 by winning the Arthur Rubinstein Competition. (He is also a visual artist whose works can be seen on his website.)
At first impression, Mr. Rabinovich, with his trimmed beard and three-piece suit, looked a little bookish for this informal and intimate space. But he immediately brought a wonderful brio and spontaneity to Bach’s English Suite No. 4 in F, the opening work. This score is infused with dance idioms. Yet even in a stylish courante or minuet, Bach the ingenious master of counterpoint is ever-present. The challenge for a pianist is to convey the bouncy character of a dance while bringing clarity to the intricate contrapuntal lines. Mr. Rabinovich did so beautifully. The concluding Gigue, taken at a bracing tempo, was especially exciting.
He then turned to Bartok’s Three Burlesques, completed in 1911. Though the pieces draw in rough-hewed ways on folk elements, bustling parody seems the driving force here, especially in the first one, the cluster-chord-strewn “Perpatvar” (Quarrel), thought to be a taunting depiction of a spat the composer had with his first wife. In this and the other two burlesques, Mr. Rabinovich played with crisp rhythmic bite and abundant colorings.
Without leaving the stage, he performed Brahms’s formidable Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel. Most pianists would choose this piece as a heroic and virtuosic conclusion to a recital. Mr. Rabinovich performed it with uncommon sensitivity and feeling for the elements of Baroque style and dance forms that inspired Brahms.
He ended with a rarity, four of Smetana’s Czech dances, character pieces based on folk tunes that concluded with a dizzying, madcap “Hop Dance.”
As this winning recital made clear, Mr. Schiff is a discerning judge of young pianists.
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