A review of the concert on October 13, 2002 by Lyn Bronson.

This weekend provided the interesting experience of hearing two winners of last year’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. On Friday evening, silver medal winner Antonio Pompa-Baldi played a recital for the Mozart Society of California at Carmel Presbyterian Church in Carmel, and then on Sunday evening at the Petit Trianon in San Jose, Stanislav Ioudenitch, gold medal winner of the same competition played a recital for the Steinway Society, the Bay Area.

We didn’t attend the Van Cliburn Competition in Ft. Worth last year, but on the day following each performance, live, unedited recordings of each event were available on the Internet for download and could be heard at leisure. Thus, we had an opportunity to hear all the semifinalists and finalists, and it was our opinion, shared by some others, that Pompa-Baldi should have been awarded the gold medal.

Now having heard Ioudenitch in a live performance in front of an audience (and what an audience, for over 400 people showed at a 350-seat hall, so that was standing room only and the audience spilled over into the lobby), it was perfectly apparent that he has an prize-winning personal magnetism and a star quality that is totally captivating. When we came out of Ioudenitch’s recital, we felt supercharged and totally up.

And, herein lies the problem. Although it is the personal electricity that Ioudenitch injects into everything that he plays that is so winning, nevertheless, musically, there are some aspects that are less than satisfying.

Let me make an analogy. Suppose there was a person who developed an extraordinary skill at telling stories. He knew his stories well and always tried to be compelling to his audience by paying acute attention to his dramatic delivery. While telling a story he would constantly modulate the timbre of his voice, exaggerate his loudness and softness, add in spiky accents for emphasis, pause for effects, make big gestures to accompany the story, etc., etc. This is, in effect, what Ioudenitch is constantly doing as a performer. Effective as it is in riveting our attention, it does not always enhance the music being performed.

Pompa-Baldi, on the other hand, is a performer whose understanding of the music itself drives the performance, so that the music sounds natural and convincing. His performances of the Mozart F Major Sonata, K.332 and Debussy’s Suite Bergamasque were enchanting because they were musically so convincing, technically so controlled, and tonally so refined. If there were any complaint about Pompa-Baldi’s performance it would be in his overplaying of large scale works such as the Chopin and Rachmaninoff B-flat Minor Sonatas where the dynamic levels were often pushed beyond the capacity of a modern Steinway concert grand. It was the overplaying of these two masterpieces that left me feeling slightly unfulfilled. I wasn’t entirely convinced that pounding out climatic passages to the level where ugly overtones begin to prevail is the ultimate solution to creating excitement in a concert performance.

Ioudenitch can also flail away percussively in climatic passages, but often it seemed appropriate. For example, in his fantastic performance of Stravinsky’s Trois Movements de Petrouchka, passages exploiting the ultimate in fortissimo intensity were contrasted with passages of tonal sensitivity utilizing a wide range of dynamics from the loudest to the softest. Also, in his only encore, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6, his playing was just totally off the charts in visceral excitement, but never seemed in excess of what the instrument would tolerate.

We drove 85 miles to hear Ioudenitch, and unfortunately Sunday evening holiday traffic delayed us to the point that we missed the first fifteen minutes of the recital in which he played the Mozart Fantasie in D Minor, K.397 and the first movement of Mozart’s Sonata in A Minor, K.310. We did hear, however, the final two movements of the Mozart Sonata in which there was some very sensitive and expressive playing.

The other major work on the program was the great Schubert A Major, Op. Posth., Sonata, which Ioudenitch played from score with a page turner. This was a very involving performance that maintained our attention from beginning to end. Occasionally there were intrusive accents or overly loud passages that seemed out of character and style for this work, but for the most part this was compelling playing.

Both Ioudenitch and Pompa-Baldi have a long professional life in front of them. How they will grow, and in what direction, remain unanswered questions. Horowitz in his late twenties was exciting, but mannered and sometimes hysterical in his fussiness. Rubinstein in his late twenties was exciting, passionate and unrefined. It is interesting to consider how these two giants of the twentieth century later matured. Horowitz ultimately gave us incredibly fine performances of Scarlatti, Haydn, Rachmaninoff and Schumann. Rubinstein, well, he simply became Artur Rubinstein, and got better and better at what he always did well.

Ioudenitch in this recital was at turns seductively expressive in his slower playing and absolutely electrifying in his barnstorming performance of Stravinsky and Liszt. If he can learn to rein in his tendency to exaggeration and develop more naturalness in his playing, he has the potential to become a very great pianist indeed for a long period to come.

It will be interesting to see what the future has in store for Ioudenitch and Pompa-Baldi.