MUSIC REVIEW : Pianist Moura Lympany in Recital at Ambassador Auditorium

In a career spanning six decades, Moura Lympany has sometimes been accused of being a specialist--as in the works of Rachmaninoff, which she has played and recorded extensively. In truth, Lympany is a generalist in the sense that Artur Rubinstein was a generalist--an expert at all she surveys.

Chopin was the object of Lympany’s scrutiny Thursday night, when the English pianist, now 72, played her first recital at Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena. Merely two works comprised her program: the 24 Preludes of Opus 28 and the B-minor Sonata. At the end, three more Chopin pieces made up the encore set; they were the G-flat Waltz and the etudes in C-sharp minor and G-flat, Opus 10, Nos. 4 and 5.

For those who have admired Lympany’s heroic, exquisite pianism since the time of her U.S. debut in 1948, this was a reminder of the force and seductiveness of her art.

She made the Preludes a great, sweeping mural in autumnal colors--not the set of individual and separate emotional mosaics some others aim to create. And her reading of the sonata was the remembrance of an epic, not the actual struggle and victory itself.

Lympany, at this stage in a career that was launched when she placed second (to Emil Gilels) in an international competition in Brussels in 1938, plays the piano with the same sculptured beauties and technical prowess we remember. But her interpretive presence seems less acute, her musical aggressiveness less potent. One could admire every portion of her Thursday performance without considering a lot of it definitive.

The palpable charm missing in the program proper bloomed for a magical three minutes in the G-flat Waltz. Then, when a couple of favorite nocturnes came to mind as appropriate, Lympany, speaking for the first time in the evening, said to the audience, “That was a Waltz, of course. Now, it’s a Study,” and launched into the first of the two etudes, both of which she played with dash and fire, never looking back.