From The Washington Post

(www.washingtonpost.com)

 By Anne Midgette

Washington Post Staff Writer

Competitions are a meaningless measuring stick of a musician's talent, and yet in the absence of any other way to assess young unknown talent, we continue to treat them as if they measured something that mattered. So it was that a chief credential of Plamena Mangova, a pianist who made her North American debut at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater on Saturday afternoon, was a silver medalist in the 2007 Queen Elisabeth competition in Brussels. She was presented as part of the Hayes Piano Series of the Washington Performing Arts Society, which does have a pretty good track record of introducing young unknowns who go on to become older and better known.

Mangova, now 29, is Bulgarian, has been playing around Europe since she was 18, and according to her program biography has just been nominated a professor at the Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel in Belgium. These credentials are indicative of a certain authority in her musicmaking, and indeed, she plays with a great deal of authority. She has a big, generous tone, and her fingers can meet the keys with a kind of precision that launches little gestures and figures and phrases out as if they were on springs.

That authority, though, is a two-edged sword. Each time Mangova was about to launch one of these figures, she offered a figurative clearing of the throat: a little pause to underline the force of what's to come, but that ended up sapping that force by breaking up the musical line. The music stopped and started, seesawing around, the tempo buffeted by rubato. The details swamped the through-line of the pieces, particularly in the opening Chopin set of the C-sharp Minor Etude (Op. 25, No. 7) and the first Ballade in G Minor, in which I was so distracted by the effects and the start-and-stop approach that it wasn't until Mangova returned for her second piece, a very solid rendition of Scriabin's Ninth Sonata, that I realized how much I liked the tone itself. It might help if she were a little less definite -- or self-conscious -- about her interpretation.

She packed a lot into her recital. The Scriabin was followed by Ravel's "Pavane Pour Une Infante Défunte" and "Alborada Del Gracioso," which for all their sparkling moments seemed a little heavy. And the second half of the program focused on Liszt, a good fit for Mangova's pianistic ability and the firm fleetness of her fingers: first three transcriptions of Schubert songs, then the Petrarch Sonnet No. 104 and the Mephisto Waltz. The Schubert songs were quite good: short, to the point, and showcases for her ability; but the Mephisto Waltz was so episodic that it started to drag on. Mangova concluded with Ginastera's "Danzas Argentinas," allowing her to show her lighter and fiery side, and to stir up the audience, which was warmly appreciative of her power.