Eugene Indjic

EUGENE Indjic stepped jauntily onstage Tuesday evening at Sanders Theater and presented his musical credentials for the first time before a Harvard audience. The recital included works by Beethoven and Chopin that are among the most demanding in the standard piano repertoire, and local piano wonks had been worrying ever since the fiiers appeared on the house bulletin boards about where Indjic would get the strength to bring them all under control.

It was clear, though, from the very first phrase of Beethoven's knotty Op. 111, that the performance would in no way resemble a wrestling match, and that technically Indjic was more than the man for the task. He played through the Chopin--six selected Etudes and two Ballades, in F major and F minor--with no sign of discomfort and though he visibly steeled himself before launching into the strenuous "Appasionata," he seemed to gather a second, or perhaps third wind and afterwards played two sparkling Debussy encores.

But since Indjic possesses a complete, effortless, even dazzling virtuoso tecnique, he carries an added responsibility to direct those hard-won skills toward musical goals. Virtuosity alone carried Indjic to intermission. After that, like the car without Platformate, he ran out of gas.

The program was best characterized by Indjic's performance of the Etudes. These are the exercises that teach the skills of which virtuosity is made. Indjic did his exercises remarkably well. Despite his choice of very quick tempi, he tossed off the flying octaves, thirds, and arpeggios with impeccable clarity and accuracy. Only in Op. 10, no. 4, did the racing notes melt into an indistinguishable blur. In every case he clearly solved the problem of extracting the melodic line from a morass of notes and floating it above the cleanly formed accompaniment. His facility was most clearly demonstrated in the familiar "Aeolian Harp" Etude where the simple tune--played entirely by the pinky of the right hand--holds forth against a feathery arpeggiated figure. Success here requires no more than complete control of the hands and a little extra thought in the practice room.

Much more is necessary to raise a performance beyond this simple level. The introspective Chopin Ballades demand an affinity for the unique style in which they were conceived. This is a stiff order for a young pianist but he must--through coaching or through other methods of consciousness expansion--steep himself in the nineteenth century romantic tradition. Indjic, did not show sufficient feel for rubato--the subtle expansions and contractions of meter. And he also lacked a discriminating taste for the shifting counterpoints--phrases, fragments of phrases, even single notes--which must be emphasized as well, to project an interesting performance of these pieces.

Playing Beethoven is a formidable, at times an impossible, undertaking. Perhaps Indjic's failure in this effort lay in not, in either a musical or a spiritual sense, listening for the inner voices. Beethoven is at all times a contrapuntist--essentially a fellow traveller with Bach. Because Indjic failed to convey this essence his performances of the two sonates were generally uninteresting and at times annoying. Nor did Indjic seem to be aware of the overall structure of the works. The first movement of Op. 111 is an uncanny mirror of Beethoven's temperament--taking ideas and treating them by turns with violence and lyricism. Indjic's inflections seemed motivated by custom, or perhaps were produced by rote, rather than by any internalized understanding of the metaphor. The superficiality became most evident in the absolute lack of communication in the lyrical Andante of the "Appasionata."

Indjic's prospects for the future are limited only by his ability to grow. His ingenuous approach to performing saved this evening from pretension, the most outrageous of concert hall sins.