ALTOGETHER INVIGORATING

London-based Italian pianist Gabriele Baldocci gave a stirring lunchtime recital to launch the annual Beethoven Piano Society of Europe's Summer Festival at Regent Hall (near Oxford Circus, London, UK), which this year features four concerts on successive Fridays, culminating in a violin and piano recital (details below).

Baldocci is a professor of piano at Trinity Laban Conservatoire and an official member of the Martha Argerich Presents project. His choice here of a fiery programme highlighted the piano's orchestral accent, ranging from the percussively brittle yet also richly lyrical sonorities of Kabalevsky's Pianos Sonata No 3 in F, Op 46 to the grandiose orchestration of Liszt's arrangement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The latter was performed as part of Baldocci's project to perform and record all nine symphonies, which has already seen the release of his Liszt-Beethoven 'Eroica' Symphony (on Dynamic CDS7771)...