Last September, Alim Beisembayev took first prize in the Leeds Piano Competition. The Kazakhstan-born pianist is only 24, and still studying at the Royal College of Music in London, but everything about his playing already seems thoroughly mature.
In the Leeds final Beisembayev had played Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, an indication perhaps of where he feels his musical centre of gravity is located. For the final recital of the Oxford Piano festival he chose a programme of Haydn, Beethoven and Liszt, and the way in which he approached Haydn’s F minor Variations, launched with bright, forward piano sound, seemed very much tilted towards 19th-century Romanticism rather than the classicism of the 18th. It was still a stylish enough performance, though, which never took undue liberties, but it did skate over some of the work’s emotional twists, and its moments of personal pathos and nostalgia.
