Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Prokofiev’s Ten Pieces for Piano, op. 75, drawn from his symphonic ballet score Romeo and Juliet: these are keyboard challenges that demand the utmost from an artist’s fingers and imagination. As such, the pieces have Bezhod Abduraimov’s name written all over them. His current West Coast recital program includes both, as well as music of César Franck and the Black American Florence Price (1987–1953), who is having quite a moment. Reading up on Abduraimov, chances are you’ll be wondering where he’s been all your life. Critics swoon over his grandiloquence and projection, but also over his finesse. Top maestros book him gladly. Now in his mid 30s, the prodigy from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, shot to the heights while still in his teens. Once he deputized, precociously, for an ailing Martha Argerich, which must have been like stepping in for the Cumaean Sibyl. On December 1, 2011, Musical America showcased the then 21-year-old winner of the 2009 London International Piano Competition as “New Artist of the Month.” At the time, he was still enrolled as an undergraduate at the private, nonprofit liberal-arts college Park University in Parkville, Missouri, while also juggling some three dozen bookings a year as far afield as Malta and Australia. Why Park? Because that was (and is) where he could attend the studio of the 2001 Van Cliburn Competition gold medalist Stanislav Ioudenitch, a fellow Uzbek he first encountered at a piano academy in Lake Como, Italy. The decision was an easy one: Ioudenitch was the right mentor at the right time. As noted, critics wax ecstatic at the artist Abduraimov has become. But let’s not strain for effect. Perhaps The Times (London) has said it best: “He has the magic touch.” —Matthew Gurewitsch