Brighton Year-Round 2026
Alvin Moisey Piano Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton
Alvin Moisey
Genre: Live Music, Music
Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
Alvin Moisey arrives at St Nicholas with a fantastic set of paraphrases on ballet. His bravura technique won awards and BBC appearances. He brings music with a Sergei Diaghilev connection: that is, music commissioned by Diaghilev or which he decided to revive.
It is astonishing Moisey is not better known.
Review
Alvin Moisey arrives at St Nicholas with a fantastic set of paraphrases on ballet. His bravura technique won awards and BBC appearances. He’s not had his due. He brings music with a Sergei Diaghilev connection: that is, music commissioned by Diaghilev or which he decided to revive. It’s a bonus that Moisey is such a good introducer, and as was said, storyteller of the pieces he plays.
He begins with Stephen Hough’s eight-minute paraphrase of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty. (A 1922 sure-fire popular revival, thought Diaghilev, bringing it to Britain. It nearly ruined him. To be fair Tchaikowsky’s penultimate ballet from 1890 is sometimes the weakest score of all the three great ballets). Hough extracts the best of it. It’s a whirl of Lisztian and Houghian bravura, which Moisey relishes as an encore piece at the wrong end. As it were.
Moisey follows this with a mesmerising transcription he made himself of the lyrical, slightly neo-classical Siciliana from the 21-year-old Constant Lambert’s second ballet Pomona, written not for Diaghilev with whom he’d fallen out over the décor to his first. That was comical. Lambert’s friend the painter Kit Wood had been replaced by Picabia and Lambert confronted Diaghilev. Lambert was then barred from attending his own Romeo and Juliet where this Siciliana also featured. The lovers escape in an aeroplane incidentally. Then the ballet was first called Adam and Eve… But Lambert also stuck up for Nijinska the choreographer. Nijinsky’s sister, Nijinska was a far greater choreographer and she rewarded Lambert with a commission for a ballet premiered in Buenos Ares in 1927: Pomona. Small wonder he wrote The Rio Grande for Angus Morrison, Moisey’s teacher.
Lambert (1905-51) was himself the British Diaghilev though a composer with genius. He recognised Diagliev too. There was a rapprochement and the two would have worked together had Diaghilev not died in 1929. As Lambert later wrote in Music Ho!: “Diaghliev had very much more genius than most of those artists he commissioned. Like a creative Al Capone who never touched a weapon, these often minor artists merely fired the guns at his orders; everything was as he envisioned.” Lambert’s overwork as conductor was killing. He was champion, almost creator of British ballet which he founded with Ninette de Valois. He also ordered sets and picked artists (his father and second wife were painters, the latter indeed for the ballet); and creating seasons. His brilliant music criticism, the wittiest and most probing since Berlioz – and drink – also contributed to kill off much of his creativity and he died young after his final ballet Tiresias.
Moisey knew of a hypnotic transcription Lambert made for pianist Angus Morrison, who was as mentioned Moisey’s teacher (very old by the 1980s); but also when young Lambert’s go-to pianist. This was played only once then lost. Moisey’s transcription uniquely recalls this. It’s a beautiful warm neo-classical work: both spare yet arching with the main melody picked out with restraint and a limpid rhythm recalling Lambert’s fresh invention. It etches a memorable lilt over about four minutes, that should be more widely known.
Moisey follows with the famous and infamous Debussy work from 1894: Prelude a l’apres-Midi d’un faune. Shocking at its premiere its transformation into a ballet in 1910 with Nijinsky dancing and suggestively slithering caused a riot. This transcription arranged in 1921 by Leonard Borwick (1868-1925), another great British pianist (who sadly never made any records), shows how easily the bright chamber textures of the original can be transfigured into the piano; where Debussy’s imaginings must have started. Moisey is hypnotic here.
Stravinsky arranged three pieces from his 1911 ballet Petroushka for Artur Rubinstein. It was originally envisaged as a piano and orchestra piece with a fight between white and black chords. The F sharp major black and C major white chords resolve into a dissonance now known as the Petroushka Chord.
So the movements return to the piano the music was originally envisaged for. Moisey rips through this work with both a brio and sense of build and sweep. He doesn’t stint in volume.
Here he produces almost stupefying levels of fractured harmony and yet resolved dissonances that make his reversal exhilarating and almost epic. Yet relatable in the slow moments.
Moisey’s command of tonal palette is absolute here. His climax of each of the three tableaux is both explosive yet theatrical. You can follow the narrative – and those Petroushka chords – and revel in its virtuosic bones with a chiming arrival.
It is astonishing Moisey is not better known. His innovative programme, presentation style and knowledge and thrilling pianism should ensure a speedy return.
