Two of last year's more significant musical anniversaries - 50 years since the death of Sibelius, and 150 since the birth of Grieg - had little relevance to pianists. But music by those two composers formed the centrepiece of Leif Ove Andsnes's Festival Hall programme. Sibelius was represented by a group of four miniatures drawn from different sets of piano pieces, in which the searching gravity of his greatest orchestral works could occasionally be inferred. Grieg was celebrated with his more substantial Ballade in G minor, which belies its name as a large-scale set of variations on a Norwegian folk song.
Andsnes played these rarities with the same uncomplicated clarity and command he brought to the more familiar works in his programme, retaining his poise and transparency even as the Grieg piece steadily ratcheted up its bravura demands. He had started with a Bach Toccata, the E minor BWV 914, a model of articulacy and rhythmic precision, and moved on to Beethoven's E flat Sonata Op 27 No 1, in which every element in its seamless structure was given perfect weight and significance.
There was a lot to admire in the Debussy Preludes that made up the second half of the evening, too. Andsnes had concocted his own sequence of 11 preludes, drawing on both books and tending to favour the pieces that evoke landscape or place, but the tour he provided around the sights and sounds of Debussy's world was just a bit too squeaky clean; one could admire the sheer finesse of the piano playing, with everything in perfect balance, but still yearn for some more pungent flavours.
