He’s Playing It by Ear : Pianist Hambro Lets Audiences Pick Program From 120 Choices

Some pianists play their recitals by the number. Leonid Hambro plays his by lottery.

Those attending Hambro’s recital Saturday in Mission Viejo will receive a numbered ticket and a list of 120 works by composers from Bach to Villa-Lobos, all of which are presumably at his fingertips. Tickets are picked one at a time, and winning ticket holders make a request. The program unfolds one piece at a time, so Hambro, 76, never knows what’s coming next.

“Nobody does this,” Hambro said in a phone interview last week from his home in New York. “It certainly steps aside from the regular ‘ho-hum-another-piano-recital’ syndrome.”

He calls the repertory list “the menu” and the recital a “command performance.” While most pianists would consider it their worst nightmare to show up for a concert not knowing what they were going to play, Hambro likes the idea.

“There are several things in my favor,” he pointed out. “Before I play a single note, the audience is involved in the evening.

“A second good thing is in the very unexpectedness of it, and I mean for the pianist. There is no way in the world a pianist can ever play a piece perfectly in terms of interpretation. A note will be too soft or too loud. Your job is to make adjustments--meaning that every live performance is somewhat improvisatory. Even though you’re aiming for the ideal performance, you’re making it up as you go along, you have to be ready to bob and weave.”

With this format, Hambro’s always ready to bob and weave.

“Since I don’t know who’s going to ask what when, there’s another advantage,” he continued. “My notion of why performers forget is that they’re thinking ahead.

“If you can manage to have a Zen approach, be right in the millisecond with the piece, your whole being reacting to the moment of playing, that piece will be very alive, you will be alert to what you have to do,” he said. “Not knowing in advance forces me to be in the now.”

In the then, Hambro spent five years at Juilliard School in New York on a fellowship during World War II and subsequently served on its faculty. He won the Naumberg Competition and was named pianist for the New York Philharmonic and the New York Times-owned radio station WQXR, where he participated in weekly live chamber and solo recitals for 15 years.

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Bela Bartok’s son selected Hambro to record the composer’s complete piano works, including the premiere recording of the First Piano Concerto. He once learned a concerto by Paul Hindemith overnight; the composer publicly deemed it “a miracle.”

He toured for 10 years with comedian Victor Borge, playing two-piano concerts. He was head of the piano department at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia for 20 years and hosted a live weekly keyboard series on radio station KPFK (90.7 FM). Most recently, he’s been touring with the Hambro Quartet of Pianos.

The inspiration for a recital program based entirely on requests grew out of Hambro’s familiarity with pianistic lore and the keyboard giants who he said had “colossal, humongous repertories” to match.

“At the beginning of this century, the king of pianists was Josef Hoffman,” Hambro said. “He played 21 concerts in St. Petersburg in which he never repeated a single piece, more than 200 pieces by memory--even the encores were different. Anton Rubinstein, Hoffman’s teacher, played close to 800 pieces by memory over a two-year span.

“When Sviatislav Richter, a pianist from our own time, took his final exam at the [Moscow] conservatory, the judges asked what he was going to play. ‘Bach, Beethoven and Schumann,’ he said. ‘Yes, but what pieces?’ they asked. ‘Whatever you want to hear,’ he said.”

Hambro challenged himself:

“I thought, let’s see how much repertoire I could put into shape and have available for one concert. The first concert I did that way, at CalArts in the ‘80s, I handed out a list of between 50 and 80 pieces from Bach to jazz. The audience members would each check off 10 favorites, and my students collated the responses.

“In the beginning, I put the pieces in some sort of order. Now I find I prefer the surprise element, the spontaneity. . . . They might pick a program that is unbalanced, but it really doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it turns out to be all Beethoven or all Chopin.

“And it doesn’t matter the order,” he continued. “I have something to say about every piece, enough anecdotal material, to make the transition.”

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The list has grown, but Hambro holds the program to a 40-minute first half and a 40-minute second half. With intermission and remarks, it’s a two-hour evening. He practices by shuffling decks of cards on the backs of which he’s written names of the compositions he plays. He picks a card, and that’s the piece he works on.

“As a pianist, you usually steel yourself for one performance, you gird your loins for that one program,” he noted. “Here it’s a matter of keeping 15 hours of music in the head versus one hour and 10 minutes of music, maybe one hour, 20 minutes with encores.”

Though there are some hefty exceptions--notably a Bach partita and a Beethoven sonata--most of the works on Hambro’s repertory list are on the shorter side; several, including “Variations on Anchors Aweigh,” are by Hambro himself.

The concept obviously allows for tremendous variety.

“If they ask for all blockbusters, it could be a tough program--theoretically I could do a program with four pieces,” Hambro pointed out. “It could also be 70 pieces, that’s not impossible. Neither extreme has ever happened.”

* Pianist Leonid Hambro performs an all-request program Saturday at McKinney Theatre, Saddleback College, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. 8 p.m. $15 to $17. (714) 582-4656.