The American pianist Abbey Simon is one of the last direct links to the old Romantic tradition. In 1930, at age 8, he became a pupil of the Polish-born virtuoso Josef Hofmann, who had studied devotedly with the great Russian pianist Anton Rubinstein. Today, the playing of the 75-year-old Simon still abounds in the qualities that marked the Romantic heritage: luxurious tone, evenness of touch, spacious sense of timing and ruminative lyricism. Clearly his approach to the piano continues to command attention, for an anniversary recital at Carnegie Hall on Monday night was nearly sold out.
Simon is not just a throwback to another era, however. He plays with greater rhythmic regularity than Hofmann, who favored an expressive freedom that can seem distorted today, when, for better or worse, incisiveness and dutiful execution are expected. Elegance and ease are the hallmarks of Simon’s playing.
His program of mainstream masterpieces — Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” Sonata, the Schumann Fantasy and the Chopin Sonata No. 3 — would have been demanding for a pianist of any age. In his favoring of the core Romantic repertory Simon also follows his teacher, a conservative who played virtually no 20th Century music. The downside of Simon’s elegance is that differences in compositional styles can get blurred in his performances. He brought rather similar qualities of refinement, delicacy and shimmering colors to these three strikingly different works.
In general, the very strengths of Simon’s playing were also its shortcomings. The Beethoven had grace and intelligence but lacked crispness and clarity. Simon captured the grandeur and poetry in the first movement of the Schumann Fantasy, but not its wild discontinuities. In the march movement, he kept the relentless dotted-note rhythmic figures from getting too jumpy, which made the music celebratory but not so strange and unsettling, qualities more adventuresome pianists can often reveal.
Chopin has been a mainstay of Simon’s repertory, and his performance of the sonata, though not particularly impetuous, was distinguished. The scurrying Scherzo movement rippled along elegantly, and the wistful Largo was shaped with expansive lyricism. Even in the most driving moments of the Presto finale, Simon’s sound was never harsh, and he had plenty of stamina.
In fact, young virtuosi who wear the blood-and-sweat effort of playing the piano like a badge of honor could learn from the effortlessness of Simon’s playing. He capped his program with three encores, including Chopin’s Etude in F, with its finger-twisting right-hand arpeggios, and Ravel’s scintillating “Alborado del Gracioso,” which was dispensed with handily.
