Modern pianists: Will they be everything to everybody? Hope not.

Pianists don’t come in complete packages anymore, or maybe never did. Artur Rubinstein and Clifford Curzon possibly fooled us into thinking that there could be a single classical pianist that you would turn to, from Mozart to Granados, for the duration of your musical life. Among current pianists, Paul Lewis can be trusted with nearly everything and delivers the kinds of peaks that come more from modern specialists than the generalists of times past. But he’s the exception.

Pianists in our more specialist era are not necessarily defined by repertoire niches, but attitude. Among three recent piano recitals, Lucas Debargue’s Nov.1 recital at Carnegie Hall was full of the kind of heated virtuosity that has not come out of France since Cecile Ousset. Brooklyn-based Beth Levin on Oct. 27 at Merkin Hall is something of a cult pianist – if you ‘get’ her, anything she plays is of interest(at least in theory). Third, Spanish pianist Joaquin Achucarro, now 90, gave what is probably his farewell to NYC recital Oct. 11 at the Guggenheim Museum, but was my first time hearing him live after many years of loving his recordings.

All of them offered such individualistic experiences that it’s hard to think of them as practitioners of the same instrument. The fact that they’re not to every taste is a compliment. Those who lived through the blandness of the 1980s and 1990s (encouraged, partly, by the soul-less perfection of digital recording technology) this is a new and improved perceptual development in the listening zeitgeist.

Achucarro was certainly around during the aforementioned CD recording frenzy, and survived it well enough that limited exposure to his recordings convinced me that I had to hear everything he had done, especially outside of Spanish repertoire. One can’t always articulate what makes a particular musician singularly appealing. Rubinstein was easy – with the warm encompassing tone quality that truly was a one-size-fits-all. Simon Rattle has described the Achucarro legato as one where the notes grow out of each other – plus an original sound that is, in Rattle’s words, “a very rare thing and it’s instantly recognizable.”

Achucarro’s hallmark of his short program was selections from Albeniz’ Iberia and Granados’ Goyescas, which he played with a coloristic authority. In contrast to the late Alicia de Larrocha (whom I revere), Achucarro’s sound is less voluptuous but has more spine. He’s a classicist in romantic clothing. What I relish is having that sensibility applied to Brahms and Chopin, in which the combination of style and 90 years of living filled the pieces nearly to the point of bursting with meaning. The music becomes epic without necessarily taking up more space. Many times, senior pianists are afflicted with rhythmic slackening. Not here.

It’s hard to know if Beth Levin is a late bloomer or if the world is late in discovering her. I first heard her in a Chamber Music Society of Philadelphia recital that told me even if the fingers weren’t in the Horowitz zone, the distinctive insights that she brought to most of what she played – especially more rarefied repertoire such as late-Beethoven – put her on the must-hear-her-at-every-opportunity list. This is not to suggest that she is demure and intellectual. Grandeur is definitely in her reach, though usually deployed only on an as-needed basis (such as the emphatically repeated chords in Beethoven’s Op. 110 that are heard before the onset of the fugue).

That’s why I was puzzled at the outset of her Merkin Hall recital, where the two main pieces were definitely in the Horowitz zone – Liszt Sonata in B minor and Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Now in her early 70s, she can do it, but why would she want to? I admire the Liszt sonata, but after her performance, I felt like the music’s relentless grandeur took up so much bandwidth that there was little room for her to tell us what she thinks of the piece that musicologists have speculated is possibly a programatic interpretation of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Some of Levin’s distinctively unfiltered insights made their way into Mussorgsky. And the recital had the added advantage of a work by Andrew Rudin Portrait Miniatures: Three Women (which, like most Rudin works, to their credit, need repeated hearings ). Was this program something she needed to get out of her system? Like a long-distance runner doing one last marathon? She has reportedly recorded both works, and I’m willing to bet that it’s there that we will get more of a Beth Levin experience. Still, my hope is that she’ll pull back from this. After a recital program like this, where else is there to go? Sorabji’s Opus Clavicembalisticum?

One thing in favor of the generalist pianists of old, such as Rubinstein, is that they didn’t need to top themselves. The currently-ultra-fashionable Igor Levit, for one, gambled a lot of recording real estate to a piano transcription of the Mahler Symphony No. 10 (first movement): The soaring string writing of the original can never be sustained by a pianist. Like Levit, Debargue, now 32 and looking a bit like Johnny Depp’s brainy nephew, is still in the stage of his career where he is seeing how far he can go in any number of ways. He doesn’t probe Scarlatti; he deep drills it. His cool, precise sonority underscores the machine-tooled quality. But he does indeed hit interpretive gold – and with an originality that no one else can claim. When he doesn’t accomplish that, well, Scarlatti can take it.

His Chopin Ballade No. 2 was downright explosive, and persuasively so, even if you wouldn’t want to hear anybody else giving the music the kind of magnitude that is far beyond the intimacy of Chopin’s own performances were said to have. One encore was one of his own compositions – a hurricane of notes titled Toccata that ultimately lost any sense of definition and color in its throbbing (yes, throbbing) overall effect. I worry about him following in the footsteps of Andrei Gavrilov, who went so far over the top in the show-off department that he lost much sense of artistry. But when he is good, Debargue has some of the most artistically magnetic fingers out there. Am I discouraging virtuosity? Both with him and with Levin? No. I just want them to be more themselves. .