Brighton Year-Round 2025

John Bruzon Piano Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton

John Bruzon

Genre: Live Music, Music

Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

It hardly seems six weeks since John Bruzon delighted with a performance here. That’s because it was February 5th and today he replaced another artist at short notice.

Bruzon begins with three Scarlatti Sonata – the traditional Russian/Soviet warm-up. Except Bruzon makes the Scarlatti Sonatas a major feature in this recital, playing six in all.

The Sonata K213 in D minor is quite well-known but more interesting than several. Opening like the famous Cat’s Fugue, and fugally winds into harmonic slipstreams and an almost adagio sense of voicings rising and merging. To call this a Sonata is stretching it, but then who makes the rules? Scarlatti framed all his Sonatas with a basic three-part structure, and this is one of the most harmonically wayward.

The G minor is less known but even more intriguing. K35 is full of small runs and shadowy coruscations: a palate cleanser, and deeply attractive, shadowed without spikes.

Sonata K14 in G major, a direct contrast (Scarlatti liked to pair off Sonatas in major and minor keys) is one of the earliest published (the first 30 in London in 1742). Starting with a rocket – something orchestras would adopt in Mannheim 30 years alter -m this joyous piece with tis continual runs and syncopations is a delight. Scampering and it takes Spanish dance rhythms (I think!) and speeds them up impossibly. It’s almost a moto perpetuo piece: one can imagine it stopping and starting again forever. But it does, just, wind down beguilingly in Bruzon’s hands.

Mozart’s D minor Fantasia is becoming almost as well-known as its moody successors the K511 Rondo and K540 Adagio. Bruzon played this work last time. Being incomplete hampered its progress for many years, but a solution was found tacking on a major finale which many suggest was the conclusion all along. It’s usually played this way, though the nagging D minor sonority – that if the Piano Concerto No 20 K466 and Don Juan – never lets its grip go. The sudden cheery resolution – what I called “a bushy-tailed finale “ last time – still comes as a shock: though Bruzon masters the D minor melancholy’s transition seamlessly, rather than the circular melancholy of those other two solo works. Satisfying playing.

The next draught of Scarlatti Sonatas are famous too. The F minor K466 is late and strangely enharmonic winding with a kind of Fandango rhythm to it, but not quite. K466 renowned for its sharp tenebrous Spanish shadows. Sadness here is more assertive. The German baroque composer Froberger used this key for grieving too. There’s a melancholy that never yields quite what it’s minor is about, in winding arabesques.

The E major K380 is one of Scarlatti’s most famous, a provisional with drums and military band invoked in its sitting and jocund pomposo effects. It’s a forerunner of Boccherini’s celebrated evocation of Cadiz.

Finally the cascading C major of K159 is another favourite too. And like K466 also played by Bruzon in February. With its chirruping cascades and counterpoint it moves to a more exploratory central section but with no real shift in tempo. emerging in Brighton coruscates its way through carnival, even Festival, like a miniature call to trumpets; crisp and articulate fire. Bruzon handles its dotted rhythms like small struts in a promenade.

It’s the hand-crossing and trills that make it a perfect introduction to Scarlatti’s world.

Chopin’s Nocturnes and Waltzes form antithetical genres of his output. The Nocturnes here C #minor and E minor Op 70/1.

The C minor with its portent of tragedy suggests a dramatic work but suddenly a legato theme of melancholic smoothness takes over, as if the tragedy has been jump-cut and we live in the aftermath. Chopin’s language here occasionally reaches for earlier sounding themes from the early 1830s. Its end with its devastating trills ascending and fading is the one of the most spine-tingling moments in Chopin.

The Waltz Op 64/2 in C sharp minor is one of Chopin’s best known. Smiling through tears. It’s really a Nocturne in Waltz clothing. Its refrain like spinning scales seem to banish everything save for a consolatory resolve. Op 64/2, written in 1847 is one of Chopin’s very last works is shadowed like some of his very earliest Waltzes: but now in earnest, under the shadow of tuberculosis. It’s very slightly riffed with a delicate portent in the B section but really the amorousness takes over, with the glissandi a small erotic thrill towards the end. Bruzon brings out tonalities I’ve not heard before, even last time.

The E minor is an early work despite its late opus, published posthumously. Though structured more like the John Field Chopin took his inspiration from, it’s wholly Chopin even so early. A pained aria or arioso rather than Nocturne in some ways, there’s a reflective central section that smoothes the way for tragedy.

The posthumous E minor Waltz really is a fine waltz. Brisk, shadowed and well defined with its descending notes, it’s a perfect conclusion to a fine impromptu recital. It’s perky despite the minor key, with a major central section that lifts the piece so that when the surprise apotheosis comes round it’s a remarkable fusion.  The  minor hovers over teen mortality and dates from around 1829, before Chopin left Poland. It was indeed written for Chopin’s sister to practice his E minor Piano Concerto (No 1).  The central B section with its soft cascades tell it all, even when reversing to the top of the keyboard. Bruzon again is crystalline.

A Bach Prelude in B minor (from the WF Bach book of 12 Little Preludes) arranged by the Russian pianist Siloti restores amends to the interpreted world with a neat inversion. Like a balm though in B minor, that remote baroque key again, this passes in its late 19th century gloss, a kind of prayer. Its middle section rises to a plea for that consolation, which comes sadly enough. Bruzon’s and Siloti’s is a romantic reading of a work foreshadowing the ‘sentimental’ world of Bach’s great son C.P.E. Bach. It seems too to foreshadow the fate of Janus-faced W.F. Bach himself: eldest son always in his father’s shadow. A greatly gifted improvisor and who unlike C.P.E. Bach, let alone his father, never realised his gifts.

With its introduction and then central theme struck out in slow chords across the still -cascading right hand it sounds like a balm on frenetic anxiety. A becalming ending to a magnificent last-minute recital.

Published March 19, 2025March 19, 2025 by Simon Jenner