According to Tchaikovsky expert David Brown, the composer's Piano Sonata is a strong candidate for the dullest piece he ever wrote. It certainly needs a strongly committed performance to stand any chance on those rare occasions when it has an outing. Fortunately, that is what it received in Elisabeth Leonskaja's recital as part of the South Bank's International Piano Series.
The Russian-born pianist excels in Romantic repertoire, and her interpretation of this wallflower of a piece brooked no opposition from the fistfuls of notes Tchaikovsky used to construct its quasi-orchestral textures. She hurled herself upon it with a concentrated effort that made its indifferent thematic material sound grandly rhetorical rather than hollow, though a lighter touch in the more delicate passages would have given it more contrast.
She began with two of Liszt's Petrarch sonnets - characteristically ornate solo keyboard versions of high-flown song settings dating from earlier in his variegated career. These needed a greater sense of improvisation, and their flow was intermittent, with the odd smudged use of pedal.
But she really got into her stride in the all-Chopin second half, in which the Nocturne in D flat divided halfway the four meaty Scherzos, each of which defines its own emotional world. Leonskaja's appreciation of the gestural quality of Chopin's ideas gave them an unusually clear and distinctive identity. Here, and in the soaring cantilena of the nocturne, her ability to profile a melody was outstanding, and in the scherzos she met each and every technical difficulty head-on. This was playing in which the odd missed note just didn't matter. Her imaginative response to these familiar scores revealed them as a sequence of heroic epics, each concentrated into a few minutes of music.
