Stephen Kovacevich | piano

After a recent concert at which Kovacevich played Beethoven’s Opus 110, Alain Lompech summarised his impressions in Bachtrack: “His piano playing has an unimaginably beautiful touch, a vocality whose internalized eloquence asserts nothing, demonstrates nothing, but fearlessly executes an arioso which is the summum of the art of the piano, a fugue without triumph, then administers the coup de grace in a second arioso from which he releases the notes of the song one by one, hiccupping, like the beats of a heart which nearly stops, then starts again. Chopin is said to have played like this, reserving his strength for brief outbursts such as those which Kovacevich finds for the last page of this sonata-confidence by a Beethoven who expresses his suffering in unequivocal didascalies”. Opus 109 in his recital programme this evening promises to be in the same vein, complemented by romantic outpourings from Schubert and Brahms.

Production Piano****