Brighton Year-Round 2026
Peter de Souza Piano Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton
Peter de Souza Piano Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton
Genre: Live Music, Music
Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
A welcome return for Peter de Souza, a London based and internationally renowned pianist who brings to St Nicholas a classical and baroque programme of refreshing 18th century proportions: Mozart and Handel.
A superb and consummately delivered recital.
Review
A welcome return for Peter de Souza, a London based and internationally renowned pianist who brings to St Nicholas a classical and baroque programme of refreshing 18th century proportions: Mozart and Handel. He’s also an engaging communicator, introducing the works and their context. There’s an exhibition currently on at the Handel House at 25 Brook Street, showing letters of Mozart and his enthusiasm for Handel. If Handel indeed had lived five more years, he would have certainly met the eight-year-old Mozart on the latter’s first trip to London in 1764.
Mozart’s Piano Sonata in D major K331, dating from 1778 is a surprise. An arresting Haydnesque Allegro con spirito is more unpredictable and lively in its quirks than some Mozart allegros. It’s fiery too and does visit some harmonically esoteric corners within its classical bounds. There’s a joyous attack and vivacity in the part-writing, which De Souza relishes bringing out.
The Andante con espressione is an extended song, remarkably airborne and exfoliating its harmonic possibilities in one breath. The Rondo-Allegro starts slowly but is soon energized with dotted rhythms and a counterpoint deploying them against an almost Beethovenian set of rather stretto-like chords. The argument is developed often in the shadowy minor and there’s a turbulence the previous movements never knew. It ends in the affirmative major of course, blowing all minor memories away and with an emphatic coda.
It’s a remarkable sonata and De Souza addresses it with a crisp playfulness that’s exactly the right approach.
Handel’s Suites aren’t nearly enough known and it’s forgotten how consummate a writer a keyboard he was. Indeed Handel was perhaps the greatest keyboard player of his day alongside Bach. In 1720 he regularized his pirated Suites and made a mint on them. Though for a while during the period instrument revival they were declared the preserve of the harpsichord, this didn’t last long; with pianists like Sviatislav Richter, Andre Gavrilov and Murray Perahia taking them up on the modern piano from the 1980s and 1990s.
The No 3 in D minor HWV428 contains an aria-like Allemande and then the Air and 5 Doubles, more serious, even plangent.
Not that the Allemande is joyful. It’s a contemplative piece, conceived for the harpsichord but sounding very well here. It describes an arc of slow burn intensity, a kind of noblimente, but never descending into melancholy.
The Air – which does sound like an air that’s Bach-like – is followed by those five doubles. These soar in the first double with grandiose sweeps of the right hand and runs and glissandi, which characterize their quality. The next is more courante-like and runs with a touch of dotted rhythm. These increase with the next where an introspective chaconne ends the set.
Dr Souza ends with a piece he declares he finds one of the most fascinating of his life. A piece doubtfully attributed to Mozart, a Romance in A major. A lambent and lucid piece, it certainly has the poise of a Mozart piece and a song-like quality that doesn’t quite seem his. Though much else bears his fingerprint. A pupil? Possibly a young woman he taught. It sounds too like a recognizable opera aria. How Mozartian is that?
A superb and consummately delivered recital.
