David Fray, a piano star on the rise, makes his Chicago recital debut

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French-born pianist David Fray (handout photo)

Updated: January 14, 2012 8:14AM

French pianist David Fray has piqued international curiosity ever since his breakthrough in 2004, when he won the second Grand Prize at the Montreal International Music Competition. Since then he has recorded well-received discs of music by J.S. Bach and Pierre Boulez, Mozart and Schubert. His debut Chicago recital Sunday afternoon on the Symphony Center Presents series showed Fray, 30, to be a true and serious individual with remarkable technique as well as musical things to say in his performance. That he still has room for growth is not a negative criticism.

Because of his long hair, boyish good looks, hunched posture, use of a chair rather than a piano bench and the occasional audible humming, it’s easy to see why a Glenn Gould tag has been attached to Fray. But it’s a misapplication as his playing makes clear. This is a musician trying to dig deep and subtly not to explode traditional interpretation.

The Bach link with Gould is real, though. One has the sense that Fray’s natural affinity for the almost mathematical combination of intricacy and elegance of the Leipzig master’s compositions allows him to analyze later, classical works with a special sense of rhythm and to bring the digital precision of an organist or harpsichordist to Mozart and Beethoven.

That method can cut in at least two ways as this program showed. What Fray found in his top-down approach to the structure of Mozart’s 1777 D Major Sonata, K. 311, was sometimes at the expense of an over-all line or sound world. At the same time, his unusual ability to play very quietly while offering a strong tone and audible distinction between each note prepared the ear for his greater successes with Mozart’s ever-astonishing 1785 C Minor Fantasy, K. 475 and Beethoven’s 1804 C Major “Waldstein” Sonata, No. 21, Op. 53.

The first half’s Beethoven, the 1801 D Major “Pastorale,” No. 15, Op. 28, found Fray at times in almost a dream world, lacking the powerful narration that defines Beethoven for many. One experienced player and listener called Fray’s pianism here “coy,” and there was indeed a sense of reserve, but that mystery was also inviting. The “Waldstein,” however, called up a visceral passion that was evident in both jawdropping runs up and down the keyboard and in climactic chords that saw the slight man flying up from his chair as his hands hit the piano.

Encores gave more clues to this interesting mind: The last two sections of Schumann’s Romantic-era 1838 “Scenes from Childhood” resonated with their ethereal qualities. The second movement Allemande from Bach’s Partita No. 6 projected Fray’s love of investigating individual measures back over the whole program.

Fray is married to the daughter of Chicago Symphony Orchestra music director Riccardo Muti, which probably delayed his first Chicago appearance rather than giving him any boost.

After the recital, his focus was on their 11-month-old daughter, Gilda. “When I am touring, and I play the Schumann piece ‘Child Falling Asleep,’ I know that with the time difference to Paris, Gilda is asleep, and I am thinking of her,” he said afterward backstage. I’m curious to see where this very personal sense of music takes this unusual artist.

Andrew Patner is critic at large for WFMT-FM (98.7).