CLASSCOL

Melvyn Tan’s playing epitomizes quite a lot of what’s right, and what’s wrong, about this whole authentic-performance hangup. Tan, who specializes in playing old pianos (across the historical spectrum from the forte-piano of Mozart’s time to the piano-forte of later decades) is popular through his many records; surprisingly, however, his performances here over the past two weeks constituted his local debut.To start MaryAnn Bonino’s “Chamber Music in Historic Sites” a week ago Friday, Tan played the three sonatas of Beethoven’s Opus 2 plus an early sonata of Mozart. Then this past week, with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra at Pasadena’s Ambassador Auditorium and UCLA’s Royce Hall, he played an early Mozart concerto and, more remarkable, participated in a brand-new piece (sort of brand-new, anyhow) by Stephen Hartke, the Chamber Orchestra’s composer-in-residence.Tan, born in Singapore in 1956 and now living in London, is not the only advocate of early pianos, but he has become the most flamboyant and, thus, popular. His affectations at the keyboard are what a lot of people think solo performers should look like — the head bobbing, the hands (whenever not otherwise employed) engaged in spinning gossamer cobwebs above the keyboard. The word “cute” made its way more than once into intermission conversations.Affectation on the part of performers’ stage deneanor is not necessary a sin in itself; you need look no farther than Leonard Bernstein for proof. But Melvyn Tan’s playing is also, you might say, “cute” and, in that way, most disturbing. He reduced great moments in the Beethoven Sonatas — of which there were many — to a series of fussy, overshaded, disconnected events. There are always reasons to suspect that a performer who takes up exotic instruments and nonstandard repertory, as Tan has built a reputation for doing, might be hiding inadequate musicianship behind the mask of authenticity. I have seen Tan often in other cities, notably with Roger Norrington’s London Classical Players for whom he is the house pianist. At the start I found it difficult to look at him while playing. These last two weeks I’ve found it difficult to listen to him as well.If it wasn’t all that interesting a week for fortepianists, it was a shade more interesting for small orchestras. At the end of last week Vladimir Spivakov brought his Moscow Virtuosi to Royce Hall; this week there has been our own Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra.Spivakov’s marvelous orchestra didn’t draw very well; we happy few were well rewarded, however. Most of the music was for strings alone, but the two French horns that joined the ensemble for Mozart’s wondrous 29th Symphony brought out marvelously the element of the demoniac that Mozart had written for those instruments. Coming two nights after Tan’s first recital, that one performance restored the awareness of the many violent passions that sweep across the music of this indescribable genius. Mozart was 18 when he wrote it; call it a youthful work, but remember also that, at 18, half his life was over.The highlight of the Moscow program was yet another new discovery from Alfred Schnittke, a Sonata for Violin with the original piano accompaniment newly scored for chamber orchestra. Spivakov himself played the solo.What dazzling, edgy, thoroughly original music! One great sense in Schnittke’s music is the sureness in the way it unfolds. Sometimes it takes sideswipes at other people’s music — there is a hint or two of Stravinsky here and there in this Sonata. The best of it is the assurance it gives off that tough, serious, extended new music is still flowing off a few inspired pens somewhere.Alas, Stephen Hartke’s 9-minute work for the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, offered no comparable heartsease. The orchestra’s management has had the clever idea of commissioning a number of American composers to write short works to form a latter-day tribute to Mozart. It’s not that bad an idea, as witness Ravel’s “Tombeau de Couperin” or Brahms’ Haydn Variations.It wasn’t a bad idea, the Hartke, just a bad piece. People sometimes ask why the current breed of American composers so often indulge in lightweight, insipid, forgettable compositions. One answer, of course, is that orchestral managements and audiences delight in the whole “it’s modern but no so bad” repertory. But that’s only a halfway answer, and we have the example of Mel Powell’s Pulitzer-winning Two-Piano Concerto of 1990 to prove that it doesn’t have to be that way.But the new Hartke piece, which goes by the imponderable name “I Kiss Your Hands a Thousand Times” (a familiar salutation in Mozart’s letters to his father), simply wasted everybody’s time: a kind of lavender later-romantic nocturne (Faure, perhaps). It included a few lines for Melvyn Tan’s fortepiano, but they might as well have been played on a kazoo for all the personality they embodied.