Benjamin Grosvenor explores B minor with Chopin and Liszt

I could listen to Benjamin Grosvenor play Chopin all day. The Nocturne no. 20 in C sharp minor, his encore after last night’s recital at a near-capacity Queen Elizabeth Hall, was a microcosm of his qualities; a right hand which produces cascades of pearls with perfect note-by-note evenness but beautiful arabesques over the length of a phrase, a left hand that sometimes moves in direct synchronisation with the right or sometimes decouples from it to provide rubato effects to keep you guessing, a balance between the two that makes for a transparent sound across the whole register.

But this recital was about far more than technique and far more than just Chopin. The meat of the programme compared two great B minor sonatas, Chopin’s no. 3 being preceded by Liszt’s. Grosvenor brought out many of the commonalities – the Chopin is quite Lisztian and parts of the Liszt sound remarkably like Chopin – as well as showing the contrasts.

In his symphonies, Gustav Mahler explicitly attempted to picture the whole of creation. With just a piano to work with, Liszt moves a fair way in that direction. Grosvenor led us through the gamut of the sonata’s wild mood swings: the deliberate, brooding darkness of the descending opening theme; the second theme developing from rumble into excitement into exultant triumph; the middle section an outpouring of lyrical gentleness; the fugato section played at bewildering speed; the final bars casting soft but veiled sunlight.

The richness of the melodies came through beautifully, the interweaving and development of the different main themes deftly handled. The sense of scale, of the work’s self-importance, was tangible. There was no mistaking the intent and mood of each section, although it was sometimes unclear what direction the music was taking in the context of the overall work. Many performers of this sonata include a sense of Mephistophelean threat that was mostly absent here.

Where Liszt looks at the cosmos, Chopin’s Piano Sonata no. 3 in B minor looks at the individual. At the outset, Grosvenor painted a picture of true heroism. There was surprisingly unexaggerated rubato... but Grosvenor made it count. He moved from the heroic into the personal, drawing real tenderness from those cascades of high notes, thickening the texture into full-on passion and then relaxing back to sunlit softness – brighter, less veiled than the end of the Liszt. The short second movement Scherzo combined the quicksilver torrent of high notes with superbly crisp interventions from the left. The start of the Largo was imposing, but it’s a long movement and this was the one part of the concert where I lost the thread, uncertain of the music’s purpose until the sense of heroism was restored in a splendidly exciting finale.

There had been more B minor for the recital’s curtain-raiser, a Bach arrangement by Rachmaninov’s cousin Alexander Siloti. That was followed by Sofia Gubaidulina’s Chaconne, a piece that starts broken and angular, then flows and moves into a gallop, a flight of fancy which entertained but sat rather oddly as a companion to the major works that followed.

At no point did this Grosvenor indulge in any histrionics or grand gesturing – there’s no greater body motion than the occasional forward dip of the head and shoulders. Rather, his style was economical, with all the energy going into the fingers, a style in which the pianist is utterly in the service of the music rather than projecting himself, yet one that showed his qualities at their finest.