Russian Pianist’s L.A. Debut Full of Wonder

You can spend a lot of time listening to the teeming brood of young pianists. But save your superlatives until you have heard Eldar Nebolsin, the 24-year-old who made his L.A. debut Monday, opening the new Gold Medal Series at the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts.

Nebolsin is not the neatest of pianists, though possessed of a tremendous technique and capable of almost finicky precision when it suits his purposes. The important thing is that he does have purposes; he finds wonder and joy in the music at hand and communicates it without reservation.

The Russian pianist--from Uzbekistan and now living in New York--brought a curious, potentially one-dimensional collection of German Romantic fancies as his calling card. Fortunately, he has the freshness of humor and the sincerity of sentiment to thoroughly inhabit a work of protean whimsy such as Robert Schumann’s “Carnaval.” The dances whirled with dark, moody elegance, the lover’s allusions sang passionately, and as a capper, the march was sassy as possible.

Nebolsin found kindred spirits in Beethoven’s Opus 33 Bagatelles and the “Eroica” Variations. Supreme clarity of texture and a generally crisper, lighter touch distinguished these pieces mechanically, but Schumann’s musical characters would have felt right at home in the kaleidoscopic variations. Reminding us that his art is not confined to musical posing, Nebolsin delivered a Largo variation of otherworldly poignancy, controlling the ebb and flow of tension with effortless grace.

In Nebolsin’s hands, the Bagatelles suggested the hitherto undocumented influence of P.D.Q. Bach on Beethoven, running deliciously amok. In encore there was a brief, spicy snippet from Prokofiev’s ballet “Cinderella.”