MUSIC REVIEWS : Pianist Oleg Volkov in Debut at South Bay Arts Center

Bespectacled and professorial, Oleg Volkov seems a self-deprecating recitalist. At the piano, he flaunts no mannerisms, behaves like a gentleman and never makes a scene.

Yet, he commands attention because his playing, though inconsistent, has originality along with virtuosity. He is a musician of individualism.

Volkov played a lot of 64th notes in his debut appearance in Marsee Auditorium at the South Bay Center for the Arts Friday night, but what he played best was not quick--it was poetic and it was touching.

In the two left-hand pieces of Scriabin’s Opus 9, the Prelude and Nocturne, he made a beautiful sound and created a continuity of handsome tension. It was gratifying.

He made less sense of the same composer’s Fourth Sonata, which this time around lacked a follow-able scenario and exhibited neither its wonted sensuality nor its emotional urgency; the second movement moved rapidly but did not soar.

What was missing in the sonata had actually taken place in Prokofiev’s brilliant “Sarcasms,” Opus 17: Volkov achieved and projected, one by one, the pointed character, the unique temperament of each separate item in a highly colorful way.

However, throughout this showy, unhackneyed and quirky program, the 37-year old pianist accomplished a great sameness in the music of contrasting composers. His rhapsodic approach to Beethoven, Schubert and Russian composers could be admirable in its search for spontaneity, yet it failed in specificity.

A well-oiled technique cannot stand alone; to it must be added the emotional discipline of differentiation between styles.