It is every concert promoter’s worst fear when an artist cancels a concert due to illness – finding replacements at short notice is never easy. Imagine then the problem when the replacement artist also has to cancel. Thus on Friday night the audience arrived to hear, not to the expected song recital, but a complete concert presented at very short notice by the pianist Paul Turner, an experienced soloist and chamber musician. His first half consisted mainly of works by Grieg, beginning with the well-known ‘Wedding Day at Troldhaugen’ and continuing with a selection of the ‘Lyric Pieces’. There was much sensitive playing here, the short pieces illustrating bird calls, the fluttering of butterfly wings and the solitude of the lonely traveller, all captured with pianistic skill.
Continuing the recital, Chopin’s ‘Fantasie Impromptu’ was taken at a sensible pace – so many pianists seem to delight in showing how fast they can play this, meaning the notes get lost in a blur of speed – while the posthumous Nocturne, so well-known from the film ‘The Pianist’ was beautifully played. Paul chose to occupy the second half of the concert with Mussorgsky’s ‘Pictures at an Exhibition’, a truly epic piece of piano writing. Again there was much delicate and sensitive piano playing on display, though I felt that the demonic elements in ‘The Gnome’ and ‘Baba Yaga’ were rather underplayed and a bit too cautious. Elsewhere the characterisations were handled really well and the tolling bells in ‘The Great Gate of Kiev’ sounded truly sonorous. Rather than leave us with this thunderous sound, Paul chose to play Debussy’s ‘Claire de Lune’ as his encore, a reminder of the magic of a moonlit night which, sadly, was nowhere apparent as we stepped outside into the cloudy November night.
Contributed by Duncan Eves
