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Sunday Sentinel "Astonishing recital...." (March 19, 2006) Lukas Vondracek, the Czech teenager who stunned the Forum Theatre audience with his keyboard virtuosity on the last night of Stoke-on-Trent Festival's Piano Passions last weekend, certainly demonstrated his precocity early. He gave his first public performance at the age of four.
Lukas had visited Hanley once before, last September, when he joined the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra at the Victoria Hall on the first night of the City Festival.
On that occasion he gave a brilliant and assured account of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, but even that could not have prepared the Forum audience for his astounding display in the final recital of Piano Passions.
Much of the music on the programme that night had obviously been chosen to demonstrate the farthest reaches of the Vondracek technique, and his performance in Balakirev's Oriental Fantasy, Islamey, almost beggared belief.
Balakirev admitted he was unable to play the piece, and Ravel said, when composing his Gaspard de la Nuit, that "he aimed to make it more difficult than Balakirev's Islamey".
Vondracek had begun his Forum fireworks with a stylish yet profound rendering of one of Mozart's best-known piano sonatas, the C major, K330............
Eric Snape |
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