MICHAEL DRAKE St Margaret's Church, King's Lynn

MICHAEL DRAKE

> St Margaret's Church, King's Lynn

This brilliant young pianist returned to make his mark on two of the most renowned keyboard works in classical music.

He opened with majestic chords in Beethoven's Sonata in C minor, Pathetikue, and while early bars were of little pace, they were extremely emotive, with much reflective time as the two main episodes alternated.

Those musical gaps were almost too much to bear later after the colour of the start of the Andante and there followed an exuberant finale.

And what a contrast compositionally and in performance was the same composer's Passionata Sonata.

This was fiery Freddy and broadened Beethoven dominated by the fate motif and a power bursting to be free.

The relatively delicate variations of the second movement were then given subtle tonal interests before passion returned in a free-flowing finale.

Chopin's Etudes Op.25 completed a concentrated evening in which the easy way would be to allocate a single adjective to each of the dozen studies.

In turn they flowed into filigrees of sound, sometimes in a hurry, sometimes dazzling in the arpeggios, strong (even no 9, The Butterfly) and with the heavy machinery let loose in no 10, until it relaxed into gentility to reach the end in the most descriptive of the set and the final, broadly stated melody.

It was a synopsis of Kempf's versatility with some of the most famous and extraordinary music.