Brighton Year-Round 2026
Paul Taylor, Piano Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton
Paul Taylor
Genre: Live Music, Music
Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
Once more Paul Taylor arrives at St Nicholas with his unique style of improvisational pianism. He’s been around for a few years now, enough to be praised by the International Piano Magazine.
Exhilarating and quietly unforgettable.
Review
Once more Paul Taylor arrives at St Nicholas with his unique style of improvisational pianism. He’s been around for a few years now, enough to be praised by the International Piano Magazine.
His style might be described as free flowing impressionism inflected with jazz and contemporary minimalism (only in a similar chordal progression but sounding nothing really like it), yet his is a far more complex palette that keeps shifting like colours in an ocean refracted in sunlight. That’s intolerably impressionistic in itself. Taylor’s style is easy to apprehend, hard to describe. But absolutely a small bliss to listen to.
Debussy might be discerned as a tonal reference point, but one through British composers: Frank Bridge, Cyril Scott, the short-lived William Baines (particularly), and later. But harmonically and most of all structurally Taylor in an underlying palate recalls – and it’s a sudden realisation – Kaikhosru Sorabji: the same endless patterning, the same endless sweep and music flourishing from colliding small cells. It sounds nothing like Sorabji I should add.
Taylor this time hasn’t iterated a series of titles. It seems one unchained melos. There’s chordal and harmonic progressions as Taylor sweeps up and down the keyboard with glissandi descended from some paradisal language. To these he adds descants and glittering scales slightly – even microtonally – distinct. From there he produces another wash of notes with certain fingerings that make a bid to make a tonal statement. This never happens though. Around 35.5 minutes in Certain descending notes recall Bridge’s 1918 ‘Through the Eaves’. And ‘The Hour Glass’. For around two seconds.
Taylor keeps a glistering right hand to the upper part of the keyboard whilst his left never seems to stray below lower C. The reality is different but the overall centre of tonal gravity is higher rather than lower
A few themes are stated but Taylor never allows them to settle. Towards the end as the melodies assert themselves: jazz inflections twine with eastern modes. With 41 minutes it rounded with a sleep. Exhilarating and quietly unforgettable.
