San Francisco Classical Voice

It is always a pleasure to acknowledge a new star in the firmament, particularly when that addition is as intelligent and interesting an artist as Steven Osborne, 1997 winner of the International Naumburg Competition, who was presented on Tuesday night by San Francisco Performances. A full house greeted his recital at Herbst Theater with great enthusiasm, despite the fact that the program was a long and difficult traversal for both audience and performer, with no patches of easy glamour or sparkle.

Osborne himself deliberately avoided any glamour or even conventional stage elegance, walking loosely onstage in an open black shirt and speaking about the music with cheerful modesty (and to no great effect) while rocking from one leg to the other. But when he sat down to play there were definitely celestial events occurring, a surprising number having to do with sunshine rather than starlight.

The first half of Osborne's recital was a felicitous pairing of Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales with Schubert's great and graceful Sonata in G Major, D. 784. Since Ravel's work is an homage to Schubert's volumes of charming waltzes and ländler, and since the G Major Sonata is often evocative of gentle Austrian dances, songs, and even yodels, the coupling works wonderfully. What was unexpected in both works was the amount of sunlit cheer that Osborne found in them.

Ravel's Valses are usually interpreted as a rather mordant mirror of the Austrian waltz. The lush, bitter harmonies and the sophisticated, weary melodies, all exotically perfumed, are treated as a cynical, morbid (and yet nostalgic) take on an encrusted old form. Performances are usually full of flickering shadows, languid innuendoes, and bursts of bitter energy. Osborne's Valses were virtually without shadow: lightly pedaled, rhythmically steady, and very gently nuanced. They reflected only cheerful transparency, sunlight, and innocence — truly Schubertian in guise if not in nature. After my initial astonishment, I found Osborne's playing utterly lovely and beguiling. Only the final clouded, brooding, memory-laden waltz seemed a bit hungry and alien in this performance.

The same sunny disposition informed the Schubert. Here, in spite of the superlative playing, it was easy to hope that a shadow would flicker across the 50-minute landscape. The sonata, a huge construction, needed more complexity, darkness, and conflict. Not that there weren't incredibly beautiful moments. Osborne has a superb technique, less dependable at the top dynamic range, where there is an infrequent tendency to crack notes, but mind-bogglingly good in the soft regions, where he possesses inhuman control. I have never heard so many gradations of pianissimo or such an ability to make the audience listen to those pianissimos.

On the other hand, Osborne relies too often on these heavenly hushed moments, these "special" moments that signal to an audience that a musical event of great significance is taking place. Such playing is in danger of a "boy-who-cried-wolf" backlash if used too often. For example, the four bars before the return of the first theme were so soft that there was nothing special, no sinking-into-place feeling about the recapitulation itself.

The final movement was the most successful. Osborne's sense of simple charm, honesty, and grace was most effective in this elegant but folkish music, his dancelike rhythmic sense was impeccable, and the ending was everything it should be: sweet, elusive, and with a hint of nostalgia.