For the last week, the Hungarian Cultural Centre has been promoting a series of varied concerts at Kings Place to celebrate Liszt's Bicentenary. The closing concert was on Saturday night: a piano recital by Dénes Várjon, with an all-Liszt programme culminating in the B minor Sonata. We may not see much of Várjon in the UK, but he's a regular on the European festival circuit, and highly respected in Hungary. He is a professor at the Ferenc Liszt University in Budapest, and cuts a rather professorial figure in glasses and tail coat. The people at the Cultural Centre were very excited about the prospect of hearing him.
Before talking about the music, there's an important thing to say: in my opinion, Kings Place is a truly wonderful place to hear piano music. The combination of piano and acoustics last night were exceptional: top notes of the piano were clear and bell-like, low notes robust and resonant, and every note clearly audible despite Liszt's sometimes thick and complex textures. (It also makes the hall an unforgiving place: any mild imperfection in the playing was precisely audible, as was the slightest crinkle of a snack wrapper or rustling of a programme.) We were fortunate enough to sit in row C, but I overheard someone sitting further back who speculated that the subtlety of the performance would not have been possible if the pianist had needed to force his sound to fill a larger hall.
Várjon certainly did the hall proud. I suspect that much of the credit for the clarity of the textures goes to his pedal-work: at times, his feet seemed to be moving as frantically fast as his fingers. And while his timing was occasionally a shade off perfect on the slower passages, he was marvellous on the faster ones, achieving clarity and drive.
The first half of the programme was a varied collection of shorter pieces from Liszt's travels around Europe, which Várjon played in a single sitting, without pauses for applause. First up was the delicate tracery of Sposalizio, inspired by a Rafael painting of the wedding of the Virgin Mary. We had the poet's conflicting emotions in Sonetto di Petrarca no. 104, the joie-de-vivre of the first Valse Oubliée, the picturesque fountains of the Villa d'Este in Rome, and the spiritual uplifting of the Sursum Corda ("lift up our hearts") from the Catholic liturgy. Every piece shows Liszt displaying a different set of textures and dynamics to achieve an emotional or pictorial result. With the exception of Schlaflos! ("Insomnia"), which for some reason failed to grab, I was thoroughly convinced by every one.