Moving from Schubert through Chopin to Liszt, this recital by Alim Beisembayev – the Kazakh-born winner of 2021’s Leeds international piano competition – described an arc delineating the passionate surge of Romanticism over the span of 30 or so years from the 1820s to 1853.
Beisembayev’s approach to Schubert’s Moments Musicaux, D780, was calm and understated, perhaps as a way of underlining the vast contrast with the Liszt yet to come. Using the fine acoustic of the Dora Stoutzker hall to his advantage, he created an intimacy where Schubert’s characteristic slipping in and out of major and minor modes was quietly evocative. Tellingly, the two Moments in F minor – No 3 where sadness and insouciance dance together and No 5 with its more dramatic outbursts – presaged the key of Chopin’s Fantaisie, Op49.
