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Andrew Sun

Maksim Mrvica

Academy for Performing Arts

Final show last night

With his blond-streaked mess of hair and open-collared designer shirt, Maksim Mrvica  is not your usual piano player. He is a crossover classic-pop sensation.

Performing two near sold-out shows on Thursday and last night at the Academy for Performing Arts' Lyric Theatre, Maksim poses one big question: can he actually play?  Well, sort of.

Opening with his caffeinated hit, Flight of the Bumble Bee, it is obvious the Croatian idol has technical skills. But then, it is a piece that requires no emotion whatsoever - and the same might be said of Maksim himself. He commands the keys like a wizard, with a fondness for trills and crescendos that run up and down the scale.

But interpreting the music with passion takes more than big hands and fast fingers.  Maksim's heavy reliance of the physical side of playing is the opposite of expressive players like Yundi Li,  another hot, young pianist. This was most evident on his somewhat awkward recital of a Chopin etude.

No doubt, Li couldn't work a pair of tight pants like Maksim either. But the Zagreb native does run a well-paced show, snapping the audience to attention at the outset, progressing to more melancholic interludes - including pieces by Croatian composer Tonci Huljic  - and rearing back again for a space-age finale of Rachmaninov's  Variation on a Theme by Paganini.

The piano player also premiered The Olympic Dream, his anthem for the summer games. In typical Olympian fashion, it is pastoral and melodic.  You can almost see the triumphant slow-motion athletes. In between, there is some funkier Grieg, Handel and the Biblical chart-topper Exodus.

At times, Maksim threatened to become muzak. But mostly, the straight-ahead beats he plods over leave the songs hopelessly flat. But, that's rock and roll, so roll over, Beethoven! Maksim is not awful, but he is not memorable either.



Classic-pop pianist Maksim threatens musak territory