Last September, Alim Beisembayev took first prize in the Leeds Piano Competition. The Kazakhstan-born pianist is only 24, and still studying at the Royal College of Music in London, but everything about his playing already seems thoroughly mature.
In the Leeds final Beisembayev had played Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, an indication perhaps of where he feels his musical centre of gravity is located. For the final recital of the Oxford Piano festival he chose a programme of Haydn, Beethoven and Liszt, and the way in which he approached Haydn’s F minor Variations, launched with bright, forward piano sound, seemed very much tilted towards 19th-century Romanticism rather than the classicism of the 18th. It was still a stylish enough performance, though, which never took undue liberties, but it did skate over some of the work’s emotional twists, and its moments of personal pathos and nostalgia.
Piano music doesn’t get much more grown up than Beethoven’s last sonata, Op 111 in C minor, and Beisembayev tackled it with impressive assurance, giving the first movement an imposing sense of grandeur and steering a steady course through the variations that follow. It wasn’t the most searching of performances, but it had great integrity and intelligence.
If there is still space for development in his playing, it’s in his range of keyboard colour and dynamics; even in the selection of Liszt’s Transcendental Studies that made up the second half of his programme there were very few genuine pianissimos. He played seven of the 12 studies, following the order in which they were published. There was swagger about Mazeppa, lacy, delicate tracery in Feux Follets; Beisembayev’s technique seems pretty impregnable, though the Study in F minor became splashy at times. Perhaps by then he was beginning to tire, and Harmonies du Soir and Chasse-neige, the closing two pieces, did seem to lose focus. But he could still summon up an encore – Scarlatti’s G major sonata L486, delivered with bright, crisp rhythms. This is a pianist with a real future, no doubt.
