Over the past decade, it may seem as if I've used this column to regularly bash the Bachauer.

It began in 1984 as a cleanup report on that year's Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition, a chance to tie up some loose ends following our mad dash to get the immediate results in Sunday's paper.Then, in 1986, I questioned whether there even should have been a first-place winner and, in 1988 and 1991, whether it should have been that particular winner.

Not this year. Not with the awarding of the gold medal to 23-year-old Nicholas Angelich, following his electrifying performance of the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto Saturday in Abravanel Hall.

Oh, there are the usual brickbats one could throw at the jury: Why sixth place for Giampaolo Stuani, whose Rachmaninoff Second was arguably the best-played of the four performances of that concerto heard in the finals? And why the elimination at every stage of one or more pianists who seemingly could have done as well or better in the later rounds as many of those who weren't eliminated?

(The names Thomas Grubmueller, Peter Longworth, Oleg Marshev, Anthony Molinaro and Hannes Rox figure prominently here. Indeed, there were some who felt Molinaro was perhaps the major "find" of this year's contest.)

At the same time, though, I doubt any of them could have done better than Angelich, whose Rachmaninoff Third was not only a better choice for a competition concerto but seems to me perhaps the finest single concerto performance in Bachauer history.

Not that it hasn't drawn its share of brickbats, too. I know pianists who were mightily offended at some of the liberties this transplanted Ohioan (now literally an American in Paris) took with this piece. And it was a pretty freewheeling rendition with regard to tempos - most of them on the fast side.

But for my money this excitingly played performance far outclassed the less imaginative, and often less elegant, Rachmaninoff Thirds of previous years, not to mention the generally dull Rachmaninoff Seconds.

(An exception: the authentic Slavic passion fourth-place winner George Vatchnadze brought to the latter. But even he was not above virtually rewriting the coda.)

The effect was more or less to create the concerto anew, something I do not object to in a piece the composer subjected to various cuts along the way, not to mention an alternate first-movement cadenza. (For the record, Angelich played it complete, with the tougher of the two cadenzas - not the one Rachmaninoff himself favored.)

And, not coincidentally, it also demonstrated that, in addition to the high level of musicianship evident in his earlier rounds, he is very much able to ignite an audience, most of whom were out of their seats at the concerto's conclusion.

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As a result, he won not only the $8,000 first prize but the $1,000 audience prize - an award I deplore, but it is a useful barometer. Were that not enough, an anonymous donor upped the ante for the six finalists by an additional $1,000 each, so impressed was he with what he heard Friday.

For her part, Yasuko Fukuda, president of the Piano Teachers National Association of Japan, was so impressed with Angelich Saturday that she offered him a debut recital in Tokyo, in addition to the one he will have in New York.

That's the kind of excitement this year's winner is generating. And the kind of followup I like to write.

See you in '97.

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