IN one respect, the celebrity recital given at the Perth Festival on Saturday night by French pianist Bernard d'Ascoli was a bizarre musical concoction.

After a short opening set of four pieces by Chopin, which were a bit monochrome in their delivery, d'Ascoli devoted the rest of the first half of his programme to a series of unconnected works by four different composers which were played, not only without pause between each, but, clearly intentionally, as a continuum.

The one thing they absolutely had in common was that they were all Preludes. So two by Messiaen (from his early, scandalously neglected set of eight) flowed into three by Scriabin, then on into one by Rachmaninov, and - most

bizarre of all - into Gershwin's

little tryptich.

On paper it maybe looked like a good idea, and d'Ascoli had carefully judged the experiment so that the mood, as the music moved from one to the next was vaguely similar - the tempestuous end of the Scriabin linked with the Rachmaninov following.

But the cost was, simply, the individuality of each composer as d'Ascoli blurred the edges of distinctiveness. Messiaen (played too fast) lost his timelessness, Rachmaninov lost his dark Russian colour, and Gershwin's blues inflections turned to perfume.

No such idiosyncrasies - fortunately - marred an idiomatic performance of Chopin's 24 Preludes opus 28.

Though d'Ascoli's pianism is much stronger on poetry than on drama (he lacks real physical weight in his playing) the consistency of his interpretation - to say nothing of the spectacular feat of digital accuracy from the blind French pianist - was its most impressive feature.