Elisabeth Leonskaja | Oxford Piano Festival

Schubert wondered how he could follow in the pianistic footsteps of Beethoven. In the end, he found a way – following that composer’s terse intensity with a world of lyrical expanse, mining emotional complexity through technical simplicity. An icon among pianists, Elisabeth Leonskaja, comes to the festival to traverse Schubert’s world from the dreamy but turbulent B major sonata to the abysmal melancholy of his penultimate work in the form and the peak of the composer’s vision of the Impromptu.