Recitals by Leif Ove Andsnes deliver exactly what they promise: immaculate, well-mannered performances in which every chord is perfectly weighted, every dynamic nicely judged and each phrase has a beginning, middle and end. What they rarely contain is any element of surprise, a moment of interpretative insight perhaps, or a hint of eccentricity, anything to confound expectations.
Sometimes Andsnes's playing does provide a frisson. In the opening Allegro of Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata Op 53, for instance, which began his Cheltenham festival recital, the sheer exuberance with which every harmonic excursion was presented made the performance tinglingly fresh. But it was followed by a ponderous account of the slow movement that seemed to be searching for a profundity that just wasn't there; this drained the rest of the sonata of its opening joie de vivre.
There were good things at the start of Brahms's Op 10 Ballades, too. Andsnes brought out their debt to Schumann's miniatures in a way few other pianists manage, before spontaneity was suffocated by introspection, and turned the last of the four pieces into a real endurance test. Schoenberg's Six Little Piano Pieces Op 19 were perfectly chiselled if hardly expressionistic, but they did act as the perfect curtain-raiser to the drama of Beethoven's C minor Sonata Op 111. Once again, the playing was immaculate, though its power was underplayed. Some sense of technical strain, of effort, might have given the performance of the first movement the drama it lacked, just as one waited for the variations of the finale to deliver their moment of transcendence, but it never came.
