The extravagantly acclaimed, exotically named Arcadi Volodos showed surprising skills as a spaced-out miniaturist before a modest Music Center crowd Friday night. Although he occasionally demonstrated the flair and fireworks that have made the St. Petersburg-born 27-year old a Sony Classics headliner, it was his penchant for drifting off into extraordinary three-dimensional holograms of musical illumination that created the most memorable moments in a quietly communing recital in which Volodos only began to connect with his audience at the recital’s end and in the encore sequence that followed.


Volodos began with a somnolent performance of the piano version of the slow movement from Brahms’ Sextet, Op. 18, which demonstrated the pianist’s seemingly primary interest in creating thoughtful, almost unassuming contexts for his powerful visionary flights. As these took place, the music suddenly separated into almost tangible layers of sound that, although not highly colored, had an inner radiance to them.


Though it had some beautiful moments, Volodos missed most of the neurotic restlessness of Schumann’s Kreisleriana, but found some glorious poetry in Schubert’s unexceptional early (1815) Sonata. The three Liszt Schubert song arrangements - Der Müller und der Bach, Aufenthalt and Der Doppelgänger - were played with an inner beauty that set the stage for the concluding and audience-pleasing Liszt to come.


After the program was over, the young pianist played four encores, beginning with the quiet repose of a Scriabin Prelude and working through Rachmaninoff and Moszkowski to the incendiary glory of Horowitz’s Carmen Fantasy.



Laurence Vittes