PROGRAM Brahms Four Ballades op. 10 0m00s-22m58s Rachmaninov Variations on a Theme of Corelli, op. 42 23m50s-40m21s Bartok Dance Suite (original version) 42m26s-58m43s Granados El Amor y la Muerte (from Goyescas) 59m53s-1h12m26s Ravel La Valse 1h13m37s-1h24m25s Encores: Bach/Petri Sheep May Safely Graze 1h25m41s-1h30m35s Brahms/Cziffra Hungarian Dance no. 5 1h31m32s-End Metropolitan Museum of Art November 5, 2010 The New York Times. Steve Smith New York. NY. Of all the terms that could describe a pianist’s work, “rightness” is probably among the least precise. Yet again and again as Alessio Bax performed at the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Friday night, everything in his program unfolded with an ease, precision and beauty so seemingly effortless that the music appeared to live and breathe of its own volition. That the concert was billed as Mr. Bax’s New York debut recital was to some extent a matter of terminology and marketing; clips from his solo performances during the International Keyboard Institute and Festival at Mannes College the New School for Music in 2007 and 2008 can be viewed on YouTube. In 2009 Mr. Bax, an Italian now based in New York, collaborated with the Jupiter Symphony Chamber Players and appeared at Le Poisson Rouge in a duo with his wife, the pianist Lucille Chung. A member of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Mr. Bax performs with that organization on Sunday. Still, Mr. Bax, who counts a 2009 Avery Fisher Career Grant among his numerous awards and accolades, is worth getting excited about. Rather than leading with a virtuoso splash, he opened with an account of Brahms’s four Ballades notable for its poetic flexibility and lyrical reserve. Long-breathed melodies unfurled almost casually over contrary rhythms, lending a sense of spontaneous creation. Mr. Bax’s prim execution was evident in the frolicsome flickers and lashes of the Third Ballade, yet his emphasis had less to do with technical display than with philosophical insight and emotional potency. Likewise his airy touch was ideally suited to the melancholy, ruminative strangeness of the Fourth Ballade. An account of Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Corelli — a work featured on Mr. Bax’s appealing 2004 debut CD, “Baroque Reflections” — offered buoyant rhythms crisply executed as well as a dreamy ebb and flow in the slower variations. He unleashed his fieriest technique in an animated romp through Bartok’s Dance Suite and reaffirmed his grasp of songlike phrasing in a plain-spoken “El Amor y la Muerte” from Granados’s “Goyescas.” Closing the program was Mr. Bax’s tastefully enhanced interpretation of “La Valse” by Ravel: less mordant than richly opulent, rising from Stygian gloom into a gaudy efflorescence, with glissandos that whistled as if no touch were involved. An audience unwilling to let Mr. Bax go was rewarded with two encores: Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze,” in a tranquil arrangement by Egon Petri, and Gyorgy Cziffra’s brilliantly embellished version of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5.

• published: 24 May 2016
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