From Newsday, July 2004

If the luminous recital hall at Mannes College of Music were a boat, it would surely tip over during International Keyboard Institute & Festival concerts. The audience, heavy on apprentice and professional musicians, clusters on the keyboard side of the auditorium, reverently studying niceties of piano fingering and technique.

With its superb programming, intimate venue and modest ticket prices, the festival remains one of the highlights of New York's summer music season. Contrasting recitals by two slightly below-the-radar luminaries were among the first week's offerings.

Bach was the common thread running through Tuesday's concert by Fabio Bidini, though the program featured only one work based on the master's music: Busoni's transcription of the Chaconne, BWV 1004. Bidini, a master of color and dynamics, began the Chaconne with full- bodied but lean tone, building the work with a stunning sense of drama and inexorability to a crashing ending, bathed in haunting, organ-like sonorities.

Bach's harmonic explorations permeated the rest of Bidini's program, which consisted of Book I of Debussy's "Images" and works by Chopin. While he cannot quite match the uncanny, liquescent touch of Walter Gieseking or Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli in Debussy's music, Bidini summoned downy undercurrents and a hazy shimmer in "Reflêts dans l'eau" and an iridescent swirl for the opening of "Mouvements."

Bidini's Chopin was bewitching, all the more so in a hall similar in size to the salons where the Polish composer performed. His playing of the posthumous Nocturne evoked Maria Callas in Bellini, with its silvery shadings and beautifully disciplined sense of line and architecture. The Scherzo No. 2 found Bidini in fitful form, but he made a flowing whole of the sometimes pensive, sometimes extroverted Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante, which sang with a delicious lilt.

Jeffrey Swann devoted Thursday's concert and lecture to three late works by Beethoven. After a somewhat stolid and colorless opening to the Opus 90 sonata, Swann offered a lovingly molded, gemütlich reading of the work's songlike final movement. The gentle filigree of Opus 101's adagio found Beethoven and Swann making time stand still. Its reverie was shattered to devastating effect by the wild, noisy trills and cascading counterpoint of the sonata's finale.

The sheer gnarliness of Beethoven's writing in the "Hammerklavier" sonata sometimes got the better of Swann, but his performance grew in strength as the work progressed. The sturdy eloquence and lack of showiness in his playing served him well in the slow movement, with its bleak, ramshackle waltz and telling silences. The outbursts of the final fugue blistered and stunned but also sounded haunted, as if Beethoven were straining to reach beyond the communicative capacities of the piano and, indeed, beyond the powers of music itself.