Sunday April 7, 1985
by Stephen Holden
It was as grand and amusing an entrance as any performer has made on a stage famous for its grand entrances. Wearing more than 100 pounds of pink feathers, Liberace stepped out of a giant Faberge-style egg at the opening-night show Thursday of his Radio City Music Hall engagement. Descending a staircase, he handed his outer garment to the chauffeur of a Rolls-Royce limousine driven on stage. The robe was one of several costumes, each more regal than the one preceding, that Liberace modeled before an oohing and ahhing audience whose attitude suggested the awe usually reserved for phenomena like the Grand Canyon.
During a two-hour show, in which Liberace kicked it up with the Rockettes, played a lot of piano and did a little singing, one was reminded that he is the one who started it all. Without his example, pop keyboard showmen like Elton John, Peter Allen and Barry Manilow would probably have evolved in very different directions. And where would Boy George, whose mixture of prim courtliness and visual flamboyance are admittedly inspired by Liberace, have found his inspiration?
Where Liberace differs significantly from his descendants is in his musical taste. If his fondness for ostentation has influenced two generations of pop- music showmen, the iconography of his presentation is 19th-century romantic. His forerunners are Chopin and Liszt. As he explained on Thursday, his trademark candle abra was inspired by the 1945 Hollywood biography of Chopin, ''A Song to Remember.'' Flicking the bejeweled tails of his jacket behind the piano bench, he plays an instrument that has been transformed with rhinestones and tracery into an oversized object of sacred art.
The blending of Hollywood, Las Vegas and 19th-century romantic mysticism informs Liberace's musical style as much as it does the decor. The pianist opened with a salute to Gershwin, in which he framed several familiar tunes within a fragment of ''Rhapsody in Blue.'' He continued with three different versions of ''Mack the Knife,'' arranged in the style of Mozart, Debussy and Johann Strauss. The tribute to his pop idol, Eddie Duchin, was revealing in the way it intermingled Chopin with a brittle, ornamental ''society piano'' style.
As Liberace's costuming has grown more exaggerated, so has his pianism, especially in its more romantic aspects. There was a time when Liberace played Tchaikovsky, Chopin and Rachmaninoff with a relatively straightforward facility. But in his medleys of Gershwin and Chopin on Thursday, Liberace carried familiar themes in new directions, underscoring the melodies with double octaves, trilling in almost every phrase, and inserting breathless pauses between melodic motifs. And as ever, he used sweeping arpeggiated flourishes to make musical connections.
All these devices are now underscored by heavy miking that gives the music a metallic orchestral texture. And although one doesn't sense it so much in his treatment of the classics as in his up-tempo pop, the pianist's technique is still formidable. A rip-roaring ''Beer-Barrel Polka'' accompanied by thundering fireworks was the virtuosic high point of Thursday's show.
Through stylistic exaggeration and technology, Liberace has arrived at a style that is not classical, jazz or pop but an ornamental genre unto itself. When the pianist affectionately reminisced about his friendship with Mae West, one could see the parallels. Just as Miss West became a one-of-a-kind sexual archetype, more comic than enticing, Liberace is a one-of-a-kind musical monument in whom romanticism and conscious self-parody merge into a complex, endearing caricature.
First published in The New York Times, April 7 1985
