Alberto Reyes, young Uruguayan pianist, gave his first recital at the Pan American Union last night, as a winner of a competition sponsored by the OAS. He has quite a number of winnings behind him, among them as a finalist in the Fourth International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, in 1971. He plays impressively also.

It was a meat-and-potatoes program, so jammed with great music and so beautifully balanced that I wondered if the audience, the pianist, or myself could endure the weight of it all.

Most of the beauty of the program, however, was the way in which Reyes brought it all to life. His playing breathed poetry; there was enough color for an orchestra. He does not exploit the piano for the sake of technical display, rather uses it to draw life from those little black dots on the page.

Perhaps the Beethoven took a few pages to achieve momentum. This is a very heavy introspective work, but balanced by a bit of academia - a fugue. Reyes played it masterfully. And yet the brutal, nervous Ginastera Sonata and the Ravel "Sonatine" were the high points of the recital.