Brighton Year-Round 2026
Aleandro Giuseppe Libano Piano Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton
Aleandro Giuseppe Libano
Genre: Live Music, Music
Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
Aleandro Giuseppe Libano, an Italian pianist attracting plaudits at the start of a career, debuts at St Nicholas with a mainly classical programme: Bach, Beethoven and de Falls. The last composer’s 150th anniversary falls this year and Libano’s contribution is timely and unusual. Interestingly each work seems set exactly 100 years from its predecessor.
A superb recital and a pianist on the way to mastery. Libano will certainly be worth hearing too on his return.
Review
Aleandro Giuseppe Libano, an Italian pianist attracting plaudits at the start of a career, debuts at St Nicholas with a mainly classical programme: Bach, Beethoven and de Falls. The last composer’s 150th anniversary falls this year and Libano’s contribution is timely and unusual. Interestingly each work seems set exactly 100 years from its predecessor.
Bach’s Partita No.2 in C minor from around 1720 is perhaps the best known of his six. From the opening Sinfonia and suite of dances and movements it’s gravity never lifts for long, even in the succeeding Allemande and running Courante. Libano voices the inner parts with an elan and clean line that renders these classic pianistic takes on harpsichord works.
Of all composers who wrote it harpsichord Bach seems the most easily transposed to the piano. Perhaps that’s because Bach so much of his own work and it so often flourishes with different instruments. There’s none of the special tang that his son C.P.E. Bach found in writing for different keyboards.
The Sarabande is perhaps the heart of the work though the tonal shifts are sober and the mood kept even when rippling through the strutting Rondeau and final Capriccio: which might formally live up to its name; but Bach subverts its tonal jouissance with dark, darting sleights Libano delights in.
As he does with the subsided waywardness in Beethoven’s late Piano Sonata No 30 in E major Op 109 from 1820: only two more would follow over the next two years. It’s a work known for Its opening seduction into a fantasia-like world follows by a Prestissimo that darkens the nominal radiance of E major shot through with the silk of lamenting E minor. These are linked movements fused almost as one: the sonata feels like a two movement work which the final Sonata Op 111 on fact was.
This Theme and variations is most unusual for a classic work. It normally would function as the slow movement. Beethoven unfolds a set of variations with an almost Schubertan radiance, certainly lyric simplicity. Being Beethoven though this won’t last as simple lyric.
Libano draws attention to what he feels is a connection with Bach and the baroque in general. That in his opening movement, like a Prelude and the Prestissimo, Beethoven seemed keen to re-invoke baroque forms. That would include the theme and variations finale.
The variations are characterized, notably in one by a moment in dotted rhythm that lasts barely 30 seconds till it interrupts itself with a slow variation before reverting to the dotted rhythms. Even in a standard set of variations turn Beethoven fuses sonata development in a giddying language of renewal and innovation. It certainly allows the finale to speed at a sudden lick that Libano particularly relishes.
Libano seems peculiarly at home in the late Capriccio of this sonata and it’s abrupt changes. In the overwhelming arrival of the coda – detailed with Beethoven’s sudden deployment of single notes as markets – he’s sovereign.
Falla’s Fantasia Baetica from 1919 is a rarity in the UK for no good reason. Falla wrote it for Artur Rubenstein who often performed it. Libano unleashed shimmering colours denied him from the earlier works. There’s a dramatic heft too that allows de Falla and Rubinstein some evocative stillness after the flurry of the opening. Those who know his piano Concerto Nights in the Gardens of Spain – also written for Rubenstein in 1916 – will recognise the tonal palate here. The sections unfold rippling between rapt reflection and wild dance rhythms.
There is though a ferocity in its culminating pages that’s quite new. It glitters to an exultant strut and dance with eruptions that then recede. It’s a fascinating work with what promises to be an almost mystical coda shot through with dances escaped from his ballets like The Three-Cornered Hat. Then the dances take over. Libano is absolutely in command here.
His encore is a Mazurka from Scriabin’s Op 25, No 3 in A minor. This isn’t quite the Scriabin we know, but with some characteristic lyrical compressions his fingerprint emerges. Rapt and quiet, dating from Scriabin’s early Chopin period, it’s also – like all Scriabin’s Mazurkas – absurdly unknown.
Libano has declared a huge range of musical interest, including championing the music of Giacinto Scelsi (1905-88) an avant-garde composer so ahead of his time he made composers 20 years younger (like Luciano Berio) look quite trad. We still haven’t caught up with him. Scelsi’s piano music is one of his least-known outputs. He found the piano by the 1950s could no longer encompass what he wished to say. Libano though will prove him wrong. It would be something to hear and I hope Libano records it.
A superb recital and a pianist on the way to mastery. Libano will certainly be worth hearing too on his return.
