Pleasure of Osborne’s return trip to Fair City

It is always a pleasure and an enlightenment to welcome back Steven Osborne to Perth Concert Hall’s Perth Piano Sunday series.

And, on March 26, he played before the largest audience yet.

As he chose the Steinway for this hall and has regularly returned, he is in optimum position for producing an outstanding recital. Sunday’s concert fully demonstrated this.

A frequent programme is to put the last three Beethoven Piano Sonatas together. In talking before the concert Steven Osborne was of the opinion that this is slightly mean to the paying public. And in a fascinating way he preceded each sonata by, in reverse order due to the key schemes, one of the late Brahms Intermezzi Op117.

Each of these showed playing which looked deep below the surface: for No3 thoughtfully looking back with happiness but nostalgia; No2 looked back in a worldly wise manner, with beautiful legato playing and No1 had a refined lullaby, turning darkly menacing then calming.

Beethoven’s Op109 seemed to start in the middle, exploring with purpose. Its second movement had energy, strength and confidence. The third had peace, gentle playfulness and jocularity in its variations, finally serenity in its return to the theme.

Op110 began with calm serenity, proceeded with sensitive precision, Steven Osborne using an immense dynamic range from a still clear voice to colossal waves of sound.

The short Allegro molto perhaps pictured Beethoven telling a joke: the punchline rapped out, then his laughter. The recap ended second time more moderately.

The third movement started with the saddest considerations of deep mourning before the rolling fugue started a return to life, ending, after a bleak return to the Adagio, with torrents of sound.

Osborne began the final Sonata Op111 grandly, subsiding, before a tersely powerful reading of the Allegro, most definitely con brio and appassionato. The sustained hymn-like Arietta was a very different world, musing then mounting in intensity, vehemence evaporating to the top of the keyboard and trills, transcendent and deep to the end.