If I'd been looking for adventurous classical musicians, Jean-Yves Thibaudet might have caught my eye at the Metropolitan Opera, acting a role onstage in Giordano's faded but irresistible old warhorse Fedora. Or I might have noticed him performing Schubert impromptus in the film version of Portrait of a Lady. Or I might have been intrigued by his latest CD, on which he plays music by jazz great Bill Evans.

So on April 20 I was at Avery Fisher Hall, to hear Mr. Thibaudet play his biggest New York recital yet. He sat at the piano, hesitated briefly with his hands over the keys, and then traced a sound that could have been a pencil sketch of a shimmer in the air. This was the start of Debussy's second book of Preludes, a courageous opening for a concert in such a huge space.
Mr. Thibaudet's courage paid off; unassumingly, he drew the space toward him. But after the second prelude, there was a sound like muttered thunder, the footsteps of late arrivals pounding to their seats. The pianist seemed to glare, restrained himself, and then resumed -- luckily the third prelude is assertive, and gave him energy -- only to be interrupted twice again. His quiet clarity helped keep the music's spell intact, though here I missed the sound that's not in his Rachmaninoff. I would have liked a kind of golden poetry that might have brought each of the dozen preludes into a world of its own. I could hear Mr. Thibaudet shaping separate worlds, but they emerged in black and white. I wanted color.
But what got my attention was his 1995 recording of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto. Normally that piece is played by romantic piano titans, and in some ways Mr. Thibaudet is one, at least in firepower. He commands the instrument, exploding huge cascades of notes, apparently with little effort. Yet at the same time he's restrained, almost intellectual. What makes his performance work (apart from its bracing virtuosity) is focus and intelligence, along with a disarmingly delicate, almost innocent touch when the music gets quiet.

The next work -- more Debussy, L'Isle Joyeuse -- was livelier, and gave the audience some action. Mr. Thibaudet was dressed in a fine gray designer suit and sharp red socks, the socks being his trademark, a symbol, I thought, for an inner little boy who loves to play the piano flashily. That little boy romped through L'Isle Joyeuse, and got shouts of "bravo" in return.
After intermission came works by Liszt, who sometimes shimmers, too, though unlike Debussy (who writes music without any traditional harmonic anchor), Liszt soon resolves the shimmer into pure pianistic rock 'n' roll. I wouldn't want to suggest that Mr. Thibaudet played irresponsibly, either in Liszt's Les Jets d'eau à la Villa d'Este or in his Ballade No. 2, but nobody should think he didn't enjoy himself.
He finished his program with sonic candy, three of Liszt's pianistic re-creations of operatic excerpts, and, even if the crowd jumped screaming to its feet, I'd quarrel mildly with what I heard. I thought Mr. Thibaudet played these delights as piano works, divorced from their operatic origins, especially Liszt's paraphrase of the quartet from Verdi's Rigoletto. The quartet has a dual climax, an arching phrase for Verdi's soprano, answered by the tenor and the baritone. Mr. Thibaudet played the baritone's response almost as an afterthought, something impossible in real opera, because the music lies too high in the baritone range. Nobody could sing it so casually.

When I asked Mr. Thibaudet about that, he answered, almost with a playful giggle: "I like sopranos better. I'm prejudiced!" There's no question that he's an opera fan, quite apart from his appearance at the Met. He has given joint recitals with singers, among them the equally theatrical Cecilia Bartoli, and insists that he "thinks always of the voice" when he plays the Liszt transcriptions. I guess I'll just agree to disagree.
On other points, he proved refreshing. "I was so mad," he said about the interruptions during his Debussy. "I should have said 'no.' I should have started 15 minutes later." Explaining his unusual way with Rachmaninoff's concerto, he cites a remarkably cerebral recording by the composer himself. "It reassured me," Mr. Thibaudet said, with disarming honesty.
About jazz, he doesn't see "why we should always have musical closets," why music needs to be trapped in categories. The idea for his Conversations With Bill Evans CD came from an executive at Polygram, Mr. Thibaudet's record company (he's signed to Polygram's London label), who thought the two pianists shared some stylistic traits. "Bill Evans's dynamic range is rich in the soft register," says Mr. Thibaudet, giving an example, though he also cites what's immediately apparent when you play the recording: Bill Evans sounds like a cousin to Ravel and Debussy. Or at least he does when Mr. Thibaudet plays him. The album sounds more like an expansion of the classical repertoire than an excursion into jazz. In effect, the music loses Mr. Evans's cigarette (hanging from his lip in many photographs) and adds a new, though perfectly reasonable, sheen of formal introspection, as if Mr. Evans were trying on a suit from Mr. Thibaudet's couturier.
Which brings me to Mr. Thibaudet's appearance in Fedora at the Met, where he came onstage in antique tails, looking boyish and delighted. His character was supposed to be Chopin's nephew, a pianist and a part-time spy, though essentially Mr. Thibaudet played himself, rejecting extravagant compliments from other characters with a personable, self-deprecating pantomime. It was Giordano's inspiration to introduce this virtuoso at a bustling Parisian party, where his playing becomes the sole accompaniment to the opera's first dramatic confrontation. That made Mr. Thibaudet the partner of two seasoned vocal veterans, Plácido Domingo and Mirella Freni, and he did his job with wit and force. In fact, he outplayed anything the orchestra did that night, proving himself the perfect musical adventurer. You can take him anywhere, and he'll find a way to be himself.

Something that wasn't in the review: Thibaudet thinks he might record another jazz album, this time of music by the ultimate jazz piano virtuoso, Art Tatum

You can hear Thibaudet play Rachmaninoff on my Rach 3 page.

Wall Street Journal, April 28, 1997