Pianist Vogt overcomes Beethoven lapses to deliver transformative Schoenberg

Lars Vogt was well on his way to making a significant solo recital debut Wednesday at the American Philosophical Society when Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 32 Op. 111 started coming unraveled.

Problems began in the dense, first-movement exposition, when a memory lapse set in, one Vogt covered skillfully, but starting a spiral that eventually forced him to start over and leave the stage to grab the printed music. Also unfortunate: the piano's music stand had been removed, making page turns awkward. The rest of the performance was fast and smelled of panic. He hastily explained he had adjustment problems with the piano at hand, but the issue was clearly his memory.

In the end, the recital was significant for reminding us what we already know about the high-wire life of artists - no matter how poised they may seem in these Philadelphia Chamber Music Society concerts. Having played here in chamber music situations with other artists, Vogt, 44, is also one of the leading European pianists of his generation, one you'd trust with most any repertoire. His command of the keyboard is solid. Playing the towering Op. 111, though, is a life's work, if only to play such singular music - it never becomes as comfortable as Mozart or Brahms - with clarity that reveals interpretive vision.

Mishaps are so likely that grousing about even labored technique is ungracious. And the Wednesday audience was more than gracious, with smatterings of encouraging applause when Vogt kept forging ahead.

His pre-lapse Beethoven showed the music's many dense layers clearly laid out, almost as if the music were Bach, but fused with a combination of speed and heat that made the performance anything but safe, and revealed the countless points that the composer made by not allowing the music to be meshed easily with itself.

Both halves of the program began, unconventionally, with the same piece, Schoenberg's Sechs Kleine Klavierstucke Op. 19, an early atonal work that shows the composer at his least threatening. The piece's presence highlighted the harmonically ambiguous strangeness in much of the rest of the program - which included Schubert's Sonata in C minor - that's easily overlooked as your ear naturally gravitates toward melody. Thus, the broad-strokes starkness of the Schubert sonata was more textured in this context.

More interesting was how the Schoenberg changed when reprised in the second half. Perhaps because Vogt was heartened by a piano retuning during intermission, the music was more brilliantly colored, transforming what can often seem like a tentative experiment into a fully realized end in itself. Such Schoenberg performances are like hitting gold, so seldom do you hear them. Vogt ended with Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor, which was similarly accentuated by Schoenberg's strangeness. Might there be more Vogt concerts with greater risks?