Russian Fireworks

The campus of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, is usually known as the place where McGuffey's Readers were launched, and where Red Blaik and Ara Parseghian got their starts in football. After last week it may also be remembered as the site of the U.S. debut of the latest in a long line of Russian pianists that includes Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter. Lazar Berman, 45, is unknown in the U.S. and Western Europe. But collectors of Soviet recordings, as well as many pianists throughout the world, have for years praised his talent.

Berman is a virtuoso whose blinding technique appears an easy rival to that of Vladimir Horowitz. Yet Berman's is a humble kind of virtuosity that is not afraid of understatement. His debut, the start of a 15-concert tour of nine states, occurred in a walled-off end of Millett Hall, the Miami U. sports arena--which had surprisingly good acoustics. A burly bear with stooped shoulders, ginger-colored beard and long brown hair that waves up at the neck, Berman came out looking grim and tense. Once he was at the keyboard, all illusions of nerves or cumbersomeness vanished. He sits squarely at the piano, his eyes fixed on the keys, making no theatrical gestures.

Although Berman has not played enough for fair comparison with Gilels and Richter, one wonders if either could present a better recital.

It was a program designed to get the question of Berman's technique out of the way at once. The Liszt Sonata in B minor offers a hard challenge to any pianist's claims on a big romantic style.

Berman used the sonata to exhibit the fleetest of fingers and an extraordinary range of sound--from thundering climaxes to whispering pianissimos. Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody is entirely a display piece; Berman's epic double-octave runs near the end were breathtaking. The choice of Beethoven's crisp, bouncy Sonata No. 18, Op. 31, No. 3, rather than one of the composer's mightier scores, was wise: one does not spout deep philosophy at a fireworks display. Berman's playing of the sonata was immaculate, and not without humor.

Before he returns to Moscow, Berman will record Beethoven's Sonata No. 18, as well as the Appassionato, for Columbia.

Through its affiliation with Russia's Melodiya label, Columbia has just issued Berman's version of Liszt's twelve Transcendental Etudes, the twelve-year-old double-LP set that firmly established his reputation among record collectors. This is music that, for pure pianistic difficulty, begins where the Chopin Etudes leave off; rarely has it sounded more lyrical.

From Deutsche Grammophon conies Tchaikovsky's Concerto No. I in B-flat minor, recorded last November with Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, which is both surprising and gratifying for its underplaying of the work's slam-bang heroics.

Simple Tastes. There are times when Berman and his piano seem inseparable extensions of each other--especially during the long hours preceding a recital. An amiable, easygoing sort who gets along mostly in French while on tour, Berman concedes that he is much too nervous to take a walk or go to a movie. "I have to be close to the piano, even if I am not playing it," he says. That includes having a piano in his dressing room wherever he goes. "I must know that I can run over the keys if I need to."

A grand piano is the biggest thing in the small two-room Moscow apartment Berman shares with his wife Valentina and son Pavel. Unlike Horowitz, who plays for only about 90 minutes a day, Berman practices six to seven hours, even on the road. Berman spends a lot of time traveling. During the past 20 years he has performed in 200 cities and towns in the U.S.S.R. A man of simple tastes and beliefs, apparently devoid of the usual extremes of virtuoso temperament, Berman says: "When I play in a small town in Russia, I try to play as well as 1 do when I am in a grand hall in Moscow." He intends to be just the same in the U.S. "Whether I will succeed, time will tell."

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