Yevgeny Sudbin opened his recital with three of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas (he wrote a staggering 555), adding another two when it came to encore time.
The young Russian pianist has already established himself as a major interpreter of the composer’s work, and perhaps no one has conveyed its originality and emotional range with such finesse. In the opening set, the spiritual serenity of the D minor Sonata Kk213 offset the festive bravado of Kk159 in C and the whirling, hard-edged Kk9, also in D minor. Both of the encores were in the same key: the wistfully sensual Kk32 and the fiery Kk141, close to perfection in its dazzling elegance.
Sudbin brought the first half to its close with Beethoven’s Opus 111, a slightly unbalanced affair, its strengths and weaknesses to some extent dictated by the unusual volatility of his approach. The fiercely articulated first movement had a tangible sense of titanic struggle; the Arietta, begun with great depth of feeling, didn’t quite attain the transcendental calm that is its eventual goal.
After the interval came a curiosity in the form of Sudbin’s own arrangement of the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem – an oddly grandiose effiort, lacking in fervour. Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit, though, was spectacularly done: there were some fabulously translucent colours in Ondine; Gibet was all creepy elegance. And Scarbo closed the performance with a thrilling display of virtuoso energy and dark, demonic wit.
