MALVERN Concert Club continued its inspiring season with a recital by Danny Driver. Tall and slightly crouched at the keyboard, this pianist makes no gesture or interpretative nuance that is not entirely about the music, be it familiar or unfamiliar, miniature or monumental. He began with Handel’s Fifth Suite, disarmingly simple but for those sudden shifts of harmony and the spectacular ending to the Harmonious Blacksmith variations. He then played three of Chopin’s most intimate pieces, the last of Op.17 and the first two of the Op. 24 Mazurkas, played as if he were the only audience yet somehow projecting to the back of the hall. Three recently composed Mazurkas by Thomas Adès followed immediately. Adès is one of our most celebrated contemporary composers (his opera The Tempest has been produced at Covent Garden and at the New York Met), who also works professionally as pianist and conductor. These Mazurkas offer reflections on Chopin’s miniaturist form from an atonal, twenty-first-century perspective, using the entire range of the piano yet maintaining clarity of texture and a quiet humour. He shows that atonal music, when played with such sensitivity and understanding, can be truly beautiful as well as entertaining.

The second half comprised Beethoven’s huge Hammerklavier Sonata, Op. 106, a work which foreshadows the Ninth Symphony and which continued to pose questions for composers and pianists well into the twentieth century. In this programming we could hear references to the Handel (all those scales!), to the Chopin (in the rapt intimacy of the slow movement), and to the Adès in the exploration of unusual piano sonorities, but above all, the performance left us in awe of Beethoven’s monumental musical imagination and of the pianist able to project this sublime music without bombast but with magnificent authority. This was pianism of the highest order.

PETER JOHNSON