Image in this: sculpting soundworlds with Alessandro Taverna

A daring programme, with more than enough technical challenges which produced exciting, if uneven performances.  

As the sun dipped below the horizon Sunday afternoon, The Chopin Society UK enticed classical music enthusiasts inside Westminster Cathedral Hall with a glittering performance by Italian pianist Alessandro Taverna. Presenting Chopin, Liszt, De Falla, Satie and Stravinsky all in one programme, Taverna re-imagined his piano recital as a ballet: Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes.

Beethoven's Christus am Ölberge is paired with Haydn's Die sieben letzten Worte, a journey from agony to transcendence in which the agony proves the more honest companion.

From Three Screaming Popes to Pictures at an Exhibition, a pair of works inspired by paintings frame a violin concerto by Béla Bartók at London's Southbank Centre. 

With a spring in his step, Evgeny Kissin returns to Barbican Hall and gives well-wrought accounts of Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt and Schumann.