A Symbol Takes the Stage

By Michael Walsh

Vladimir Feltsman finally got to Carnegie Hall last week. Eight years ago, Feltsman, the Moscow-born son of a prominent Jewish pop composer, was considered one of the Soviet Union's most promising young pianists. Then he applied to the authorities for an emigration visa. Suddenly his engagements were canceled, his recordings yanked off the radio. Even a private performance at Spaso House, the U.S. Ambassador's official residence in Moscow, was marred when the piano was mysteriously vandalized before the concert. Apart from a few performances, mostly on battered uprights in remote villages, Feltsman was a musical nonperson.

His cause, however, was taken up by several prominent Americans, among them Secretary of State George Shultz; five months ago Feltsman and his family were abruptly given permission to leave. In short order, the State University of New York College at New Paltz handed Feltsman a teaching post at $80,000 a year, the powerful Columbia Artists agency lined up more than 50 engagements, and there was a concert at the White House. Almost as quickly as he had fallen into disfavor, Feltsman, 35, soared to international celebrity.

Bolstered by a surreptitious 1984 recording of the Chopin Opus 28 Preludes, Feltsman's reputation grew even while he was in musical exile. In the gossipy world of concert music, word of prodigiously gifted Soviets zips along the grapevine allegro vivace; unheard Russians like Feltsman tend to loom large in the imagination of Western audiences eagerly seeking a new pianistic hero. Then reality sets in. For every Vladimir Ashkenazy, a brilliant pianist in both technique and taste, there have been disappointments like the vapid Youri Egorov and the clangorous Lazar Berman.

Feltsman falls between extremes. An angular, bearded man with the suffering face of a symbolist poet, he communes with the keyboard, not with the audience. His technique is solid but not especially flashy, his tone rich but not warm. Like many Soviets, Feltsman has some residual romantic mannerisms, such as a rhythmic stutter step in phrasing that in the early 19th century would have been viewed as a genuine rubato (literally, robbing the time value of one note and adding it to another) but is today decried as distortion.

The Carnegie Hall recital found him both cautious and nervous. Schubert's gentle Sonata in A Major, Opus 120, was diffident and unfocused, and while the intricate variations of Schumann's Symphonic Etudes were dutifully expounded, the piece never gathered the headlong passion that should make its concluding march a shout of triumph. Better were three movements from Olivier Messiaen's dazzling Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus, in which Feltsman temporarily relaxed his inhibitions to project the music's ferocious rhythms and clashing polytonal harmonies. Best of all were the encores. In Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G-Sharp Minor, he caressed the delicate, almost impressionistic filigree, and he unleashed an impressively big sound on Beethoven's Six Variations in D Major, Opus 76, whose lumbering melody Beethoven used later for the "Turkish March" in The Ruins of Athens.

Clearly, an artist of temperament lurks beneath Feltsman's restrained exterior, but just how much, or what kind of, temperament is still unclear. Now that the man has replaced the symbol, Feltsman needs to prove he has the virtuoso's fire in his belly.