The Miami International Piano Festival always seems to have its share of glitches, and a disastrous one nearly ensued last weekend. Due to a flight cancellation and string of travel mishaps, Steven Osborne arrived in South Florida mere hours before his recital, scheduled to close the festival's Master Series.
His remarkable performance Sunday night at the Broward Center's Amaturo Theatre was a testament to Osborne's professionalism as well as his prodigious talent. Despite exhaustion, little rehearsal time, ringing cell phones and a problematic Steinway, the 33-year-old Scottish pianist delivered one of the most spellbinding musical events of the season.
Winner of the Clara Haskil and Naumburg competitions, Osborne offered an individual program that showcased his considerable keyboard gifts, with a staggering technique allied to a deep and subtle poetic sensibility.
Osborne opened with Brahms' Rhapsody in B minor, in which the pianist was entirely in synch with the mercurial shifts of this music. Osborne's blazing prestidigitation in the agitated sections was seamlessly blended with the meditative elements. His spacious phrasing in the middle F sharp minor passage was beautifully essayed, a calm new world beckoning beyond the present turmoil.
Osborne showed himself an inspired Lisztian in four excerpts from Harmonies poetiques et religieuses. Even with some sticky middle keys, the pianist had the full measure of Liszt's blend of derring-do and spare religiosity. He delivered the massive sonority of the chordal attacks in the Invocation with daunting force, as surely as he etched the unearthly delicacy of the Pater Noster.
Spacious and Olympian, the Hymne de l'enfant a son reveil glowed with a supple lyricism, the aural equivalent of a sun streaming through stained glass. The most famous of the set, Funerailles, received a vital and massively committed reading, Osborne putting across the pounding cavalry hooves and clarion trumpet calls as vigorously as the valedictory pages to the fallen hero.
It's not every day that one gets to hear Messiaen's piano music in South Florida, and Osborne was an eloquent advocate for music that can be an acquired taste.
The Scottish pianist has recorded Messiaen's complete Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jesus in its sprawling two-hour-plus form. Sunday he offered five excerpts from this bizarre yet fascinating work, music that manages to be deeply devout, raucously avant-garde and edge-of-the-seat thrilling in equal measures.
Osborne's inevitable rubato made the tolling bells of the repeated notes in the Regard du Pere seem as eternal and unchanging as the tides; throughout, the blazing ecstatic visions and harmonic explosions were staggering in their bravura. Yet he also conveyed the work's serenity and incandescent spirituality with an astonishingly wide palette of dynamics and tonal colors.
Osborne's encore of a Brahms Intermezzo was an apt closer, floated with deep, burnished expression and a searching intimacy.
Lawrence A. Johnson can be reached at ljohnson@sun-sentinel.com or 954-356-4708.
