After 100 years.....

In 1910 the young English composer Arnold Bax was in Russia when he encountered a beautiful Ukrainian girl, Natalia Karginska. Infatuated, he pursued her to Kyiv. The affair ended unhappily, but it did inspire him to write his first piano sonata. On Wednesday, after nearly a hundred years, this piece of British/Ukrainian music got its first performance in the city where it was composed. The idea was that of my friend, the gifted pianist Jonathan Powell, who when he heard I was coming out here asked whether it might be possible to arrange a recital. With the aid of local musical maven Yuriy Suldin we actually fixed up two concerts - the first one on Wednesday, when, apart from the Bax, (which turns out to be truly passionate and ends with the bells of Kiev pealing in all registers of the piano), Jonathan also played Rachmaninoff, Schubert, the Ukrainian composer (and teacher of Horowitz) Felix Blumenfeld, and works by the contemporary British composer John White and by Powell himself. The audience response on Wednesday was highly enthusiastic if slightly stunned!

Tomorrow's concert is even more challenging, including music by Ives, Alkan, Finissy and Konstantin Silvestrov. The Ives 'Concord Sonata' and the Alkan 'Symphony for solo piano' are two of the peaks of the romantic repertoire, enormously demanding in technique and interpretation. For the Silvestrov, Jonathan will be joined by members of the Ukrainian string quartet PostScriptum. Michael Finnissy's 'Concerto for solo piano no.4', which has been claimed as the most difficult piece ever written for the instrument, is the musical equivalent of 'extreme sport' ....It will be a test to see whether the audience and/or the piano survive. Or whether I do, as I wil be turning the pages.....