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Photo courtesy of Janet Franklin of the Harlequin Theatre Saturday 15 March 2008 Harlequin Centre, Redhill, Surrey
This was an excellent programme of music with fine playing by the orchestra, conducted masterfully by Pavel Kotla. The concert began with a luminous rendering of Grieg’s Peer Gynt suite number 1 with a rousing crescendo in “The Hall of the Mountain King”, and the concert closed with an electrifying performance of Sibelius’ first symphony. I shall focus my attention, however, on the centrepiece of the concert, namely Kevin Kenner’s spellbinding Grieg piano concerto. From the opening notes Kenner’s playing displayed a fire, passion and dynamic thrust perfectly befitting this concerto of the Romantic period. I can imagine that that is how the great Franz Liszt would have performed the piece. The vigour and intensity were maintained throughout this tour de force. There was then a momentous shift to the soft lyricism of the second movement. Here Kenner showed us the delicacy of touch and the poetry of the soul that characterises not only this movement but also many of the composer’s Lyric Pieces for solo piano. Here perhaps we can sense the gentle beauty of spring flowers after the harshness of winter: perhaps the composer is walking with his wife in meadows beside a fjord with waters as clear as a mirror. With Kenner’s playing of this tender song can we believe that the piano is fundamentally a percussion instrument? Following this musical idyll we were propelled back into the mood of the first movement with its ferocious energy, an elemental force equivalent to the jagged mountain peaks of Grieg’s homeland. Kenner’s fingers danced over the keys at a frenetic pace, dazzling to hear, but his virtuosity is not the hollow gesture of the exhibitionist; rather, it is the expression of a visceral energy coursing through the music. So it was that Kenner gave an outstanding performance ranging between the elementally dynamic and the wistfully lyrical, and he received a justifiably rapturous response from the audience, who were then offered another sample of his masterly playing, in this case Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu. In this ever so appropriate encore Kenner showed the same facility to jump suddenly from wild passion to quiet introspection and back in a rollercoaster of a piece and a performance. One senses that the spirit of the music he plays permeates his very being, and that marks Kenner out as a superlative musician. Charles Gordon-Graham BSc MSc Lecturer, writer and music commentator
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