John Lill at Birmingham Conservatoire

Jul 23 2008 By Norman Stinchcombe

John Lill prefaced the opening recital in this year’s Birmingham International Piano Academy with a few words, only a few he said: “Because what really matters is the music.”

His short and incisive introductions were like his playing – self-effacing, judicious and always to the point.

There is a blunt, unvarnished character to Lill’s playing of Beethoven, the composer whose works he has been most associated with in a career lasting more than 40 years.

Lill, like Claudio Arrau, gives every note due weight, there is no skimping or undue hurrying for virtuoso effect.

In the intimate acoustic of the Conservatoire’s Recital Hall the huge dynamic contrasts of Beethoven’s Pathétique sonata had the power to surprise and disconcert which is often lost in the wide spaces of a concert hall.

The shifting moods of the slow movement, which opens like a cradle song but continually veers off into something much more disturbing, were incisively captured. Lill told us that he took the third movement’s allegro marking as meaning lively rather than fast, and it never degenerated into a first-past-the post gallop.

The mercurial moods of Schumann’s Carnaval, musical vignettes of the composer’s friends and colleagues, sparkled from its opening curtain-raising flourish to its racy close. Chopin’s Nocturne in C minor, Op.48 No.1 and the rarely-heard Polonaise in F sharp minor, Op.44 were an oasis of peace and calm before the assault of Prokofiev’s seventh sonata.

Lill has tirelessly championed Prokofiev’s music and this was as exciting a performance as I’ve heard, with the finale’s relentless motoric rhythm overwhelming.

The slow movement’s wrong-note romanticism, always promising to burst into one of Prokofiev’s big ballet tunes but never doing so, was very eloquent.