Colburn’s Chen Returns for Powerful Show

After her studies at the Colburn School of Performing Arts in the 1980s, pianist Wendy Chen went on to win a series of competition prizes in the 1990s and is waving the contrasting flags of Mozart and Rachmaninoff in the concerto wars. So it was as a Distinguished Alumnus that Chen returned to her alma mater Sunday --albeit a relocated alma mater: the Zipper Concert Hall in the school’s new downtown facility.

Chen is technically endowed to do just about anything she wants on a keyboard, although her tendency to clamp down on the damper pedal and the bass-heavy, hollow sound of the Fazioli piano on hand sometimes obscured a lot of detail.

She wasn’t afraid to challenge the PC period-instrument movement with her thoughtful, brilliantly controlled renditions of Busoni’s thickened, Romanticized piano arrangements of three J.S. Bach Chorale/Preludes. She drifted impressionistically through the Chopin Andante spianato, creating lovely coloristic effects in the right hand while blurring the bass, and the succeeding Grande Polonaise had a relaxed, confident power.

Chen’s ability to throw an attractive silky veil over the piano’s tone served her well in her renditions of four nostalgic sonic paintings from Janacek’s “On an Overgrown Path,” a naive Czech equivalent of MacDowell’s miniatures. She then attacked Rachmaninoff’s Sonata No. 2 with fearless bravado, displaying plenty of temperament, drifting delicacy and a good feeling for architecture, though the details of the thundering passages often vanished in a blurred if undeniably exciting bank of sound. Her limpid encore was a transcription of the Melodie from Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice.”