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Piano Passions Forum Theatre Hanley (March 14, 2006) Staffordshire Sentinel
Review by Eric Snape
Imagine the scene at the Forum Theatre in Hanley. One of the foremost pianists of the age, playing Beethoven's mighty Appassionata sonata. He is a few bars into the second movement, the Andante, when the lights fail and all is plunged into darkness.
It happened on Saturday, on the final night of Stoke-on-Trent Festival's Piano Passions, a keyboard extravaganza stretched over four days. The audience had been promised something special, a Gala evening no less, and they sure got it.
The pianist was Lukas Vondracek of the Czech Republic. The lights out did not disturb him in the least - his stream of heavenly music simply flowed on, and after a couple of minutes the electricity was restored.
Vondracek had played Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto with the BBC Phil at the Victoria Hall last September, and made it clear then to everybody there that here was a keyboard genius out of the ordinary. And this he rammed home at the Forum on Saturday with a programme that contained pianistic elements often regarded as impossible to play.
There was Mozart's Sonata in C major, K330 and the Appassionata - need one say more? The tour de force, though, was Balakirev's Islamey. |
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