Brighton Year-Round 2026

Ivan Hovorun Piano Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton

Ivan Hovorun

Genre: Live Music, Music

Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Ukraine-born Ivan Hovorun makes a very welcome return to St Nicholas to give a classically-framed concert with introductions. Mozart, Chopin, Rachmaninov.

Mozart’s 1789 Piano Sonata in B flat major K570 is his penultimate work for the genre. Only K576 was to follow. The brilliance of B flat is given expression in the ebullient Allegro. It’s full of Haydnesque high spirits, though as ever with Mozart, harmonically more stable. It’s effervescence gives on to the minor-keyed Adagio, which beats kinship with the Adagio in B minor K540 of several months earlier. It opens out like a tragic aria in a set of variations, though one they doesn’t linger. Yet it impressed here.

The perky Allegretto which follows this dip into pathos returns is to the fizz of the opening movement. Yet heavier with the weight of where it’s been. There’s a fine valedictory finish to this work, and as Hovorun says, something of the grandeur of the public-facing Piano Concerto No 25 in C K503 from 1786. Hovorun employs a bright clean articulation, worlds away from the other works in this recital.

The Chopin Polonaise in F sharp minor Op 44 is a dark rousing to arms, recalling Chopin’s own desire to take part in the 1830 Polish uprising against Russian rule. Hovorun have an extensive introduction to Chopin in this context. It’s important to recognise Chopin wrote around 60 Mazurkas, the small peasant dances where he wrote his most experimental music. But the grand Polonaise, an aristocratic proud dance, is a larger scaled thing altogether and Chopin wrote just seven.

The F sharp minor is as you’d expect both stormy and tragic as it prances onstage in a dance of exilic intensity. This is a dance of national not personal pride of course, and the emphatic second-phrase downbeat opening of the Polonaise rhythm ripples throughout. The more lyrical central section recalls other rhythms and oddly something of the mazurka lies coiled in it. It makes for a fitting lyrical contrast. Hovorun teases out these strands and the dark headlong intensity perfectly.

More anecdotes on the next composer Rachmaninov followed preceding the two pieces from this composer. The Elegie is like a compressed then stretched Prelude. It contains elegiac  qualities, often relying on a sing rising above an accompaniment. Hovorun is particularly fine in bringing out the singing voices and levels of articulation.

The Op 3/2 C sharp minor Prelude written at 19 of course dogged Rachmaninov even more than the Piano Concerto No 2 which has the virtue of more notes.

Hovorun refuses the film noir dramatisation of this work though. He takes it with less theatrical aplomb in the opening and more slowly. We’re used to cinematic bravura here. What we get is Rachmaninov. It prepares for the contrasting stormy middle section, the apocalypse of which the brooding opening is a potent. Even here though Hovorun refuses easy crowd-pleasing. Then he lets rip with an enormous accelerando and an organ- resonant arrival with the full panoply of both work and pianism. It ends though in a whisper.

The encore is a Bach transcription of what some declare is a Vivaldi concerto, Hovorun’s own view; or a Bach relative.  Knowing Bach’s older relatives work somewhat it seems this piece is at least later-mid baroque and instrumental in origin. Whereas Bach’s family till himself were primarily vocal church composers; though not known to write for the organ.

It’s an exquisite piece, with a lilt of the sicilienne in it, which might prove conclusive. Beautifully rendered, as elsewhere with an informed, dedicated style for each composer. A short peroration to the audience and their dedication followed. Superb.

Hovorun has also cut a fine CD (mostly of encores), again on sale.

Published August 26, 2026August 26, 2026 by Simon Jenner