Pianist’s Vision Plumbs Resonant Depths

It would be tempting to place the demanding Piano Spheres recital that Gloria Cheng-Cochran played Tuesday at the Neighborhood Church in Pasadena under a colorist banner.

The pianist herself spoke of several of the pieces in terms of color, and she pulled an extraordinary range of striking sounds from a bright, articulate Fazioli without recourse to any thumping on the box or any internal manipulations.

But the ultimate power of the program came from her vision, not her fingers. Cheng-Cochran sees the forest whole, however lovingly each tree is individually nurtured. All those colors accumulate formal references and are the more vivid for it.

Cheng-Cochran’s ability to make small gestures resonate architecturally was sorely needed on the first half of the program, encompassing as it did 15 separate movements in three recent pieces. Almost half of them were in Chinary Ung’s “Seven Mirrors,” but these are hardly miniatures in sound or spirit. Rather they are character pieces of specific imagery, boldly realized on the keyboard. Ung shared the applause with Cheng-Cochran.

Another composer present for the occasion was Andrew Waggoner, whose “In the Year of Uroboros” opened the program. Its first-movement remembrance of the 1992 Los Angeles riots was effectively understated, more sorrowing than angry, and deep, tolling chords contrasted with sparkling flashes of passage-work lightning in the evocative second movement. The unmemorable third, however, fell victim to its nebulous reveries.

“Ravelled Threads,” by Wendy Carlos, succeeds all too well in its homage to Ravel. We learn little new about the Frenchman and less about Carlos, whose way with stylistic mimicry is already well-known. The first two movements are emotionally turbulent dances in the manner of “La valse,” but they wear out the conceit for the following three.

The second half of the agenda held two big-boned monuments from the late 1970s, John Adams’ justly celebrated “Phrygian Gates” and William Kraft’s underexposed “Translucences.” Cheng-Cochran is a well-practiced proponent of the Adams, delivering it with formidable breadth and glitter, as she did the robust, structured repercussions of the Kraft.