AI Artists - Ian Hobson Boston Globe Review

Concert Review
IAN HOBSON PLAYS CHOPIN, WITH ALL HIS RANGE

Author(s): Richard Dyer, Boston Globe Staff Date: April 25, 2003 Page: D19 Section: Arts / Entertainment

Ian Hobson has mapped out an interesting career trajectory. The British pianist won the prestigious Leeds International Piano Competition in 1981, and he has played with many of the major British and American orchestras.

Hobson has also won renown as a teacher at the University of Illinois and as a conductor: How many piano competition winners turn up in the conducting class at the Tanglewood Music Center, the way Hobson did in 1983? He has also made dozens of recordings ranging from the complete Beethoven sonatas to obscure repertoire.

Hobson worked first for established labels, and when the bottom began to fall out of the record business, he created his own, Zephyr. Now in his early 50s, Hobson made a Boston recital debut in the Boston Conservatory's Piano Master Series on Tuesday night in an all-Chopin program. He looks a bit like Van Cliburn, and his stage manner is comparably businesslike, although he plays in a very different style.

To Chopin he brings experience and authority: He is one of the few pianists who have dared to play the complete Chopin live. He is alert to the most overlooked aspect of the composer's music, its roots in the baroque and classical period; he plays with uncommon and rewarding attention to counterpoint and voicing, and with a strong, tensile rhythm that never sacrifices structure and momentum to incidental detail.

You can hear nearly everything that is going on in the music; his pedaling is subtle and discreet, and you never have the feeling you are listening through a scrim. He is also a virtuoso for whom the coda of the F-Minor Ballade, the A-flat Polonaise, and the finale from the Third Sonata hold no terrors; he takes no prisoners. The hurtling tempo he chose for the Polonaise proved thrilling.