SHADOWS, FANTASIES & FIREWORKS / BENJAMIN GROSVENOR Piano Recital / Review

 

SHADOWS, FANTASIES & FIREWORKS

BENJAMIN GROSVENOR Piano Recital

Victoria Concert Hall

Sunday (19 October 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 21 October 2025 with the title "Halloween came early with pianist Benjamin Grosvenor's recital".

It is twelve days before 31 October but Halloween came early with British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor’s solo recital, presented by Altenburg Arts, which had more than a touch of the morbid and macabre. The stage was drenched in blood red lighting as he opened with Frederic Chopin’s Second Sonata in B flat minor (Op.35), popularly known as his Funeral March Sonata.

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

German composer Robert Schumann called it “four of Chopin’s wildest children under the same roof”, and he was not far off the mark. The opening movement’s outpouring of raw emotion was given its full measure by Grosvenor and even if he did not include four bars of the Grave introduction in the exposition repeat, it mattered little.

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

And even before the dust could settle, the Scherzo blazed forth with such vehement intent, that the famous Funeral March could have been the only rightful outcome. In both movements, contrasts provided by the lyrical centres from the rumbling beginnings were starkly delineated. Then came the most ghostly of finales, two minutes of “wind blowing over the gravestones”, its breathless Presto hammering home the finality of death.

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

Now illuminated in pale blue, Frenchman Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit followed, a triptych of Gothic horror inspired by verses of symbolist poet Aloysius Bertrand. Grosvenor could not quite achieve the triple-pianissimo in the quivering tremulous opening of Ondine, but provided the lightest of touches to the glissandi and gravity-defying arpeggios in this Impressionist exploration of the fluid realm.

The repeated tolling of B flat octaves in Le Gibet cast a hypnotic spell, accompanying the visage of a corpse gently swaying from a gallows. The scampering of Scarbo, the finale’s devilish imp on crocked knees, has to be experienced in person as Grosvenor’s take no prisoners approach would easily best the finest versions on record. In short, it was breathtaking.

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition occupied the recital’s second half. Often criticised for threadbare piano writing, it takes a special artist to transform the monochrome score into brilliant Technicolor. Grosvenor achieved it without resorting to rewriting the music the way the great Ukrainian-American Vladimir Horowitz had done.

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

By sharply contrasting its many jagged contours, adding tremolos and doubling bass notes, all done discreetly, the music truly came alive. The Promenade movements which preceded each painting were given their own characterisations, equating to the viewer’s (or listener’s) changing moods.

Which were the most memorable pictures? The Old Castle possessed a melancholy of the ages. Goldenberg and Schmuyle, the two Polish Jews, were cast as an implacable duo. Catacombs and Cum Mortuis In Lingua Mortua (With the Dead in a Dead Language) provided an eerie chill, before the final inexorable romp that was Baba Yaga’s Hut and The Great Gate of Kiev.

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

Grosvenor’s encores were no less gripping. Ravel’s Jeux d’eau (Water Games or Fountains) was the perfect companion to the earlier Ondine while the inner voicings of the Bach-Siloti Prelude in B minor made for a sublime close.