Young Guns A-Blazin'

Pallavi Mahidhara at Strathmore, January 10, 2009

Pallavi Mahidhara, a native of Bethesda who is 21 years old, plowed ground that has been tilled by countless pianists in a concert at the Mansion at Strathmore on Saturday: the four Chopin ballades, plus the Liszt sonata. That repertoire is a tough row to hoe for a young pianist trying to make her mark; after all, pretty much every possible expression of the elements of that soil has already been cultivated by some enterprising ivory-tinkler. Nevertheless, Mahidhara made hearing these works again mostly entertaining and sometimes riveting, which is a feat in itself.

It's hard to tell from Saturday's concert whether Mahidhara is a natural exponent of Chopin. In the first Ballade, in G minor, she didn't quite allow the heartbreaking sighing theme at its center to breathe, taking it at a stride rather than lingering in its lush longing. In the opening pages of the second Ballade, she occasionally seemed to be marking time, making lovely noises with no obvious direction. And she showed remarkably little interest in Chopin rubato (either the real Chopin version, with the right hand shifting in and out of tempo over a steady left, or the bastardized everything-shifting-in-unison junk prevalent in concert halls today). It was easy, at points, to conjecture that the all-business, motive-driven western side of Montgomery County was infecting her playing, indicating once again the superiority of the more easygoing and convivial eastern half, whose crown jewel is beautiful Silver Spring. (Was that excessive?)

But the first Ballade, it must be said, did sweep along with a clean, gripping dramatic arc, and the contrasts in the second Ballade, when it did get rowdy, came out sharp and surprising in a way that more ruminantive Chopin performances often miss. Mahidhara's approach found a perfect match in the fourth Ballade; its inherently ruminative yet rhythmic main theme seemed to engage her more directly than the second and third Ballades had, and she built the drama briskly yet fastidiously until the closing pages, with anguished utterances followed immediately by consoling chords, had me on the edge of my seat.

After intermission and an appetizer of Liszt's Liebestraum no. 3 (or, as I call it, Liebestraum: With A Vengeance), Mahidhara presented what ended up being the main course of the evening, the Liszt Sonata in B minor. Here Mahidhara was again brisk, rolling through passagework in which many pianists either have to or choose to slow down, but she also savored Liszt's noble, lyrical melodies each time they appeared, at times touching them with a really impressive poetic intensity. This she contrasted with the violent outbursts that crop up throughout this sonata; she made those outbursts explode, at the audience, a few times producing an ugly tone, but always playing with purpose and a nearly irresistible energy. Some subtleties went by the wayside; there's an element of dry humor in the fugato near the end of the work that Mahidhara missed completely, and occasionally I wished for more variety in her shading of those evolving lyrical melodies. But again, she kept the drama at full boil throughout, offering something exciting around each turn; it's hard to complain too much when I ended up holding my breath as Mahidhara sounded the sonata's final high chords, waiting for the last low B to drop.

Even if she did go to Walt Whitman High School, an educational institution that all right-thinking people abhor, Mahidhara's gifts cannot be denied; it'll be interesting to see how she rounds them out as she moves on in her career and, presumably, into repertoire where her efforts stand in less shade from the great performances of the past.

Image from the Levine School of Music website. Please, Ms. Mahidhara, put a press kit up on the Web where I can grab an image.

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