Pianist Stein Offers Intriguing Recital

When Leonard Stein concluded the Piano Spheres series Tuesday at Pasadena’s Neighborhood Church, the program was a model of logical progression and cross-reference. Chalk it up to the training of a pedagogue, a former student of Schoenberg and head of the USC-based Schoenberg Institute, and a historian who has lived through many of the major shifts in our musical century.

In his neatly designed programmatic puzzle, Stein opened up each set with music from Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier, and included Luigi Dallapiccola’s Bach-referential “Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera,” a series of brief, elliptical segments. In turn, the Five Easy Pieces of Roger Sessions--in this, the 100th anniversary of his birth--were dedicated to Dallapiccola. These are not easy pieces, but the atonal rhetoric is vigorous, volcanic and dryly lyrical, by turns.

Stein also played the Third Sonata of Hanns Eisler, a favored Schoenberg pupil, and premiered a work commissioned from Joel Feigin . Feigin’s “Variations on a Theme by Arnold Schoenberg” manages to be knuckle-bustingly intense and introspective in almost equal portions. In all, the program impressed, wrapping itself up in a neat package.

If his performance was not always note-perfect or graceful in transitions, especially in his at best perfunctory reading of Bach, Stein conveyed a strong sense of purpose and the deep-spirited commitment that he has come to represent.