Pianist Alexandre Moutouzkine: Crisp, bright, clean - and finger-busting

The kind of well-groomed, well-tempered talents that arrive at the Kimmel Center are in some ways the best recommendation for refreshingly less-mediated recitals of the sort given Sunday by pianist Alexandre Moutouzkine eight blocks west at the Trinity Center for Urban Life. This young Russian pianist (just a hair over 30), presented by Astral Artists, programmed too much music (Corigliano, Schumann, Scriabin) and talked (however engagingly) at too much length. Yet he offered much to take home - even if, at the time, one struggled to take it in.

The concert also felt like the beginning of a career that will matter. Whether or not he reaches Lang Lang's global heights, Moutouzkine's kind of talent has an impact on his surroundings. The center was packed to the rafters with age groups at both extremes - thanks to his recitals at schools and senior facilities - plus the Russian community. And while his program was a finger-buster, it wasn't flashy; much of the challenge was sifting through vast thickets of notes to find the music's central and most essential ideas - one reason Scriabin's collection of little monsters known as the Etudes, Op. 8, was Moutouzkine's finest achievement.

One couldn't expect the insights that come with decades of living with this music, but Moutouzkine offered musical traffic management of the highest order. His technique is crisp, his sonority bright and clean, but without the eerie ease of Marc Andre Hamelin, giving clarity to his musical choices, but heat to the conviction behind them.

Scriabin's music itself vacillates between Chopin on steroids and a more mature manner that points to the composer's concise later piano sonatas. Even his best melodic ideas are so elaborately framed that you can miss what the framing is for; Moutouzkine made each etude a glimpse into a larger individual world. No. 11 was a detailed soliloquy, while No. 2 felt like an exploration in pure sound. By the end, the piano was significantly out of tune, and Moutouzkine probably could have used an ice pack. Yet he played two encores.

No doubt he earned most audience points with Schumann's beloved Fantasy in C, which began with an explosion of notes - mainly because this is a pianist who lets you hear them all. The composer's mental instability usually seems a million miles away amid this music's youthful extravagance. But rather than creating a warm blanket of sound with his left hand, Moutouzkine maintained an honest clarity that let you feel the fissures in the piece's emotional foundation. His soft playing wasn't just pretty, it was deep.

John Corigliano made an uncharacteristically unbuttoned appearance in the recently composed, three-movement Winging It. Though Corigliano's typical starting point is structure, this piece is mostly improvisations that he recorded and transcribed. You don't need to know that to hear the difference from his other music. Moutouzkine revealed a fascinating recurrence of archaic cadences, some sounding like traditional hymns, others like Renaissance polyphony. I wonder if the composer saw that coming. I certainly didn't.