Joyful Discovery

Joyful Discovery What is so rare as a young pianist who has a technique that approaches the heroic perfection of Horowitz? Nothing much. Many a youngster plays that well these days. The real find is the pianist who has the taste and intelligence to keep keyboard dexterity from turning into its own raison d'etre.

Such is Nelson Freire, 25. A total unknown in the U.S. only a year ago, Freire now ranks as one of the most exciting new pianists of this or any other age. Born in Boa Esperanca, Brazil, and trained in Vienna, Freire made his first big impression in 1966, when he gave a galvanically Promethean performance of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 2 in West Germany. Last winter Columbia introduced him with a two-LP album on which he played four concerto favorites--the Schumann. Grieg, Tchaikovsky First and the Liszt Totentanz. The album caught the critics by surprise and sent them scurrying for superlatives.

Obviously, talent like that had to be brought to New York, and last week was the time. As it turned out, Freire's was more than the usual debut. He was due to perform the Rachmaninoff Fourth Piano Concerto twice with the New York Philharmonic. But because another pianist, Jeanne-Marie Darre, fell ill with flu, Freire performed the concerto five times in six days.

The last evening actually became the toughest of all. After tossing off the Rachmaninoff, Freire tossed on coat, muffler and gloves for a breakneck 25-mile drive to Garden City, Long Island. There, coaxing his cold hands back to life under a hot-water tap, he made his U.S. recital debut. The program was a knuckle-cruncher (Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata, Chopin's B Minor Sonata, Bach, Liszt, Villa-Lo-bos), but Freire rippled through it as though it consisted only of minuets. If there was a sense of urgency about his playing, that was just fine with Freire. "There should be something of the logic of the moment in the performance," he says.

No Patchwork. Essentially, Freire is a classicist in a neoromantic world. His programming preferences lie in the dreamy, picturesque worlds of Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, even Rachmaninoff. Yet he consistently attacks the music with crispness and Mozartian clarity.

Despite his precision, when he plays --especially in recording--he seems to be joyfully discovering the music for the first time. One reason is that, unlike most pianists who record today, Freire does not like to splice his tapes together to achieve some kind of Utopian perfection. He prefers the single big line of an uninterrupted movement, and insists on doing the whole piece over even if the performance only goes sour for a single bar. In a recording age of electronic patchwork, such persistence and devotion are rare indeed.

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