Brighton Year-Round 2026

Louis-Victor Bak Piano Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton

Louis-Victor Bak

Genre: Live Music, Music

Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

London-based Louis-Victor Bak makes a hugely welcome return with a recital of quite adventurous French piano music. Fauré; Chopin, Ravel, Dutilleux. A distinguished graduate of the Royal College of Music, and “one to closely watch” (Diapason) he was a candidate in the 2024 Leeds International Piano Competition.

He begins with Fauré’s Nocturne No.4 in E flat major Op 36, so his early-middle phase from 1884. The striking melancholy – a singing consolation – that distinguishes Fauré from anyone else is fully established.

From the opening slowly phrases four-note motif, Bak builds this up from a lilting almost lullaby rocking rhythm to an impassioned climax that subsides with a kind of peace.  Even here the coda is long-built and shaped before it can let go.

We need far more Fauré, one of the very greatest French piano composers. His 13 each of Nocturnes and Barcarolles are spellbinding and sow a remarkable development.

Next another piece e with a rocking rhythm at its glissandi-sparkling centre. Chopin’s Scherzo No 3 in C sharp minor Op 39 from 1838 begins in the turbulent minor and stays there. Bak’s reading emphasize the heavier chordal reaches of this piece (almost Brahmsian) before the glissandi contrast. No 3 is dramatic in the way the Ballades are, and there’s little really of the Scherzo (literally “joke” or sally of wit at least) about it. Including a slower tempo than the preceding two or succeeding Scherzi.

Bak really gets the hybrid drama of a piece frames for one genre yet pushing to another. His glittering scales seem sent to set off the day’s record-breaking blaze like water from a parched fountain. It rises to a final perforation and finally all scherzo-like hell breaks loose as Bak thunders across an accelerated finishing line. And a downward glissandi like the Ballades No 1 in G minor

Bearing those fountain-like glissandi in mind it would always be intriguing to see what Bak might do with the opening C sharp major Ondine movement of Ravel’s 1908 Gaspard De La Nuit. It features a siren-like shimmering, luring men to watery depths. The emphasis on the upper register means that lower left-hand passages come in for dramatic emphasis. The whole allegro tempo is drenched in a language developed from Revels Jeu d’Eaux of 1901 and some of Mirrors. In a way Gaspard is a programme Piano Sonata.

Bak emphasizes the drama and really scales the climaxes with a whelming sense of waters closing over your head. It’s an exquisitely scaled reading, big on muscle and yet delicate, amplifying Ravel’s pianistic surfaces and above all classic linear instinct: in contrast to Debussy for instance. This means despite the multiple voices we can see where this is headed. We think. Ondine springs a detonative surprise in the coda.

For me the rarer – and absurdly underperformed – work is Henri Dutilleux’s 1946 Piano Sonata. Dutilleux (1916-2013) was the finest composer between Messaien and Boulez. The latter scorned Dutilleux’s neo-classical modernism, wrought from Debussy, Ravel and above all Roussel and Stravinsky. There’s a classical thew and sinew to Dutilleux, particularly in his earlier works. Dutilleux perseveres with his uniqueness though, and by his death was certainly the other best-known French composer, alongside Boulez.

Indeed Messaien’s wife Yvonne Loriod was just one who championed this. As did John Ogdon. Marc-André Hamelin and many French pianists.

Though it’s not I a traditional key, it’s a modal piece, meaning in this case the work centres round the key of F sharp. The abrasive yet tuneful opening Allegro con moto is purposeful and memorable, building to a slower section that then explodes with a climax that Bak really leans in on. This is terrific playing as Bak brings in chiming octaves on a Rachmaninov scale. By the time we’ve reached the reprise of the opening it’s as if we’ve scaled the Sonata already. But there’s more as the movement skills to a presto close.

Provocatively for 1946 and liberated Paris the second movement is entitled “Lied”. It’s a song but why not “Chanson”? Possibly the internationalism of Boulez – already at 21 a shaker – was extolling anti-nationalism. It’s also a homage to a different kind of singing: Germanic and darker. Certainly a chromatic trouble irradiated with hope. Its spare textures in contrast to the preceding music are extended till an accelerando intensifies the texture. It ripples through sinister glissandi glittering with some menace; before returning to the opening material. Bak picks out the spiky melodies with a delicate finality at the close

The clangorous finale – a Frankian Choral et Variations – couldn’t be more traditionally French. Bak thrills with his use of chordal bell-like sounds as he then strikes out the massive chords and skittering variations.

We move into a scherzo build-up if thrilling muscle and sweeping power akin to cool lands 1930 Variations, another work Dutilleux is kin to. As this moves into a stretto quick-march passage you can hear other variations swirl through the upper register as the lower left hand strikes through a crazed match. Now where did that come from? Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements of 1945 comes to mind. Again more as kin with its parody of goose-steps.

But the Dutilleux is far more as it explodes in a climax leaving a skitter of fireworks whelming themselves in a watery grave very close, here, to Ravel. With Debussy-esque ascending lines. But the language is already Dutilleux’s and no-one else’s. The coda helters to a thrilling close using all the keyboard in a Prokofievian peroration wrought with a confident individuality as it announces an arrival in triumphant chiming chords.

Superb: a tremendous recital.

Published June 24, 2026 by Simon Jenner