Music and Dance Reviews : Pianist Forsland at USC

If you can’t, as Lincoln said, fool all of the people all the time, you can at least fool 40 people for an afternoon, as apparently happened Sunday at USC, where pianist Rolf Bruce Forsland gave a recital of his own compositions.

The partisan audience at Hancock Auditorium deserves an award for loyalty or one for extreme naivete, for there was such a decided lack of substance to the music that one had the feeling the affair was nothing more than a practical joke. The 15 compositions on the program (including two encores offered without hesitation) were the sort of fare that would elicit hearty laughter at a party, as musicians take turns parodying all the cliches that appear in so much third-rate romantic piano music.

Stylistically, the music recalls the most banal utterings of a number of 19th-Century composers, though with far more bathos and far less harmonic interest. Perhaps as a kind of idee fixe, each work includes, at some point, a trite diatonic progression over which the same melodic sequence appears. Actually, Forsland’s music is distressingly bereft of melody, since an endless string of arpeggios, trills and tremolos takes the place of melodies.

The composition titles are of little importance, since they are generic (“11th Rhapsody,” “Fourth Ballade,” and so on) and, as far as this listener can tell, interchangeable.

Though Forsland executed the often-difficult passage work with remarkable facility, his playing had little clarity, and his overuse of the pedal made matters worse. He showed almost no subtlety in his playing, and this recital proved one of the loudest in recent memory.