MUSIC REVIEW : Pianist Thomas Lorango in Local Debut

The stereotype of a callow pianist, technically promising but musically unformed, comes to life in Thomas Lorango, who made his local debut Monday night on the Gold Medal series at Ambassador Auditorium.

It is too early to write off young Lorango’s undeniable but largely undirected talent. But one can bewail its present state of transition, a state that tended to make the listener nervous during the young American pianist’s intriguing performance of an ambitious program.

Bach’s Toccata in C minor, BWV 911, launched this agenda impressively, the 29-year-old musician displaying reliable and independent fingers, a mellow, nonpercussive tone and a strong sense of line. Alas, the rest of the program did not remain on this level of achievement.

At the end, there was an amiable, rather than ferocious, account of Prokofiev’s familiar Seventh Sonata, one neatly laid out if not always clearly projected. Projection, indeed, is the quality most often missing in Lorango’s playing.

He does not lack for musicality, his temperament seems to be emerging, and his technique shows accomplishment, if not yet breadth. But communication with his listeners is a sometime thing.

In Chopin’s F-sharp-minor Polonaise, he seemed to wander all over the emotional countryside, offering a few moments of focused feeling, many more of merely aimless, dutiful playing. And what this single Chopin piece, all by itself, was doing, beginning the second half of his recital, never came clear. Nocturne, anyone?

More frustrating for the listener was Lorango’s half-baked--but actually promising--reading of Schumann’s monumental Fantasy, Opus 17. Here, the pianist seemed to threaten at several places to cave in. Was it a failure of nerve, of memory, of octaves? Or simply a matter of finding oneself overextended and out on a limb?

After the program proper, and with strong encouragement from a large audience, Lorango offered a single encore, “one of my favorite pieces,” he said, Schumann’s Romance in F-sharp. Why it is one of his favorites did not emerge in a pallid performance, however.