FRANCESCO Piemontesi's was the third piano recital of this year's Queen's Hall morning series (Llyr Williams gives the last tomorrow) and the contrast between players has been fascinating.
First came Leif Ove Andsnes: thoughtful, rigorous – pianist of very contemporary clarity. Then came Daniil Trifonov's outrageous virtuosity, the kind of boisterous, blistering talent that harkens back to an age of great Russian pianism. Piemontesi, who is from Switzerland and not yet 30, is a more complicated player. His artistry is there in droves and yet harder to sum up, sitting somewhere in the balance between a directness of touch and a searching, not always settled musicality.
He opened with Mozart's Piano Sonata in D, K284. The phrasing was surprisingly choppy and the ornamentations abrupt – the Andante especially could have done with more long-lined calm. But Piemontesi is able to play loud chordal passages without ever sounding brash, particularly notable in the Mozart's final variation and the first movement of Schumann's Faschingsschwank aus Wien, which came next. The tone he draws from the piano is so consistently rounded that I had to check a few times whether he was playing with the soft pedal down (he wasn't). There were flecks of the great Alfred Brendel, with whom Piemontesi has worked closely, in the nobility of Schumann's Romanze movement and the lyrical sweep of his Intermezzo.
After the interval he turned to Webern's Opus 27 Variations. The middle movement had a playful swing but Piemontesi's touch wasn't quite versatile enough to bring Webern's colours to light. Finally in Schubert's late Piano Sonata in A minor D845 he strove for clarity and expansiveness – again, Brendel must be a model here.
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