From Louis Lortie, All of Chopin's Etudes, but None of His Attitudes

Every great pianist learns the Chopin etudes and many pianists venture to play a few of them in public. But it is the rare keyboard athlete who dares to play them all in one sitting and before a live audience. Louis Lortie is a such a pianist, and on Saturday afternoon at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall he not only worked his way through all 27 etudes, he threw in Chopin's hefty G Minor Ballade as an encore. This was daring, generous and perhaps foolhardy, equivalent in its physical demands and terrifying exposure to running a marathon and posing for a Vanity Fair cover shoot on the same day.

Grand gestures like this invite close scrutiny, and this recital inevitably puts Lortie into comparison with the finest Chopin masters past and present. When Lortie recorded the complete Etudes more than two decades ago -- a daring feat for a young virtuoso -- his playing was well received, but with the general caveat that these were awfully good readings for a pianist still in his 20s.

Today, unfortunately, it doesn't seem that Lortie has developed his full potential as a Chopiniste. His technique is impressive but not transcendent, and he often solves problems with the pedal rather than with the fingers or the mind. But more problematic is his seeming indifference to the essentials of Chopin's style: the poetics of texture, the flashes of contrapuntal thinking that emerge from accompaniment figures, the seamlessness of transitions and the over-civilized delicacy of every sentiment.

When the 24 major Chopin etudes were published in the 1830s, they explored and expanded the limits of piano technique. Each one attacked a specific technical challenge -- how to play long, velvety lines with just the third, fourth and fifth fingers, how to play rapid, parallel figures with just one hand, how to play with the wrist as smoothly as with the fingers. But they also encapsulated Chopin's musical thinking as much as his technique. Before he sent these little gymnasts into the world, he taught them how to dance and hold a tea cup.

Some pianists, such as Maurizio Pollini, can dazzle in the Etudes with technique alone. But Lortie doesn't have Pollini's laser-like clarity in his fingers. The "Revolutionary" Etude stormed along, but the left hand was as muddy here as it was in the rapid scale figures that punctuate the cello line of the Etude Op. 25, No. 7.

Minor technical flaws aren't fatal, but they make it all the more imperative that the pianist find and exploit the music's inner charms, the hidden nocturnes and disguised arias, in this catalogue of musical possibilities. But often, and notably in Etude Op. 10, No. 8, Lortie all but ignored the offbeat accents and syncopations, in favor of a glassy, but rather dull foregrounding of the right hand's rapid passagework.

The somber little motif -- a classic Chopin intimation of the grave -- on which the Etude Op. 25, No. 11 is built was announced at the beginning, but then lost under the torrents of notes that have earned this gem the nickname "Winter Wind." Lortie seems so dazzled by the bright light of Chopin's mechanical demands, that he misses all the little things glinting along the way.

Even a non-musician can figure out the basic challenge of Chopin's etudes. Look at the music. Note the terrifying splashes of black ink crossing the page like a seismograph registering a great cleavage of the earth. This is the part that will take years to master. But the music is everywhere else, hidden in the thickets, coaxed into daylight only by finessing slight variations in the texture and dynamics. Lortie has been playing these pieces for years, but he hasn't learned to love them for what they are: character sketches as wide as the world and as devastating in their precision as the cast of a novel by Balzac.