A LAMENTABLE DEBUT

By JESSE BIRNBAUM/BOSTON

Astrologer Gillian Helfgott should thank her lucky stars. Her husband, the mentally skewed Australian pianist David Helfgott, whose story is told in the affecting movie Shine, has sold out his 11-city North American tour; Shine has received seven Oscar nominations; chaotic though it is, Helfgott's recording of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto (the "Rach 3" of the movie) is a hot seller, and Love You to Bits and Pieces, Gillian's fuzzy-warm book about how she rescued this lost soul and lofted him to stardom, has 185,000 copies in print. "It's almost as if we've gone into orbit," says Gillian. It would seem that the only thing lacking is a Disney tie-in for a Helfgott doll.

Alas, much more is lacking. Helfgott, who as a teenager showed much promise until a breakdown sent him off to mental institutions for 12 years, is now scarcely more than a pathetic sideshow attraction, put on display by his promoters and his wife for the delight of the undiscerning, if adoring, audiences who found Shine so moving. This was evident last week when Helfgott, who will be 50 in May, appeared before a capacity crowd of 2,600 in Boston's Symphony Hall to play his first U.S. recital. His handlers dubbed the evening a "Celebration of Life," but they should have called it a lamentation.

Trotting onto the stage wearing dark pants and a white, cossack-style shirt with frilly cuffs, Helfgott, who still takes a daily mix of antipsychotic drugs, smiled giddily as applause washed over him, then launched into a formidable program of Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt and Beethoven. He hummed, groaned and jabbered as he played, his head bent low over the keyboard, his fingers flying. At times he sang a melodic line instead of playing it. Midway through a Chopin Ballade he began picking nervously at his shirt and lost the melody altogether.

His technical performance was wildly erratic, the phrasing disjointed, the rhythms unreliable. Most disconcerting was the absence of any notion of what the pieces were designed to convey; Helfgott played a lot of notes but not much music. The audience didn't mind. Each piece was greeted with a roaring standing ovation, the kind once accorded only to a Rubinstein or a Horowitz.

Summing up the next day, the Boston Globe's Richard Dyer wrote, "The sad fact is that David Helfgott should not have been in Symphony Hall last night, and neither should the rest of us." Shine director Scott Hicks disagrees, blaming "the guardians of the elite" for demanding too much of Helfgott. Gillian Helfgott's view is much the same. "I think there are probably people who are coming to see a man who has fought his way through the wilderness," she told a Boston press conference, from which her husband was notably absent. "But if they come for that reason, I think they leave deeply touched."

Such sentimentality does no service to Helfgott--or to music--since it is plainly cruel to parade him before concert audiences. In Boston, on opening night, a devoted fan declared, "This is a tribute to the indomitable human spirit." Her companion's tart reply: "No, it isn't. It's a tribute to greed and the exploitation of someone's handicap." Both were right.

--By Jesse Birnbaum/Boston