Pianist combines music and talk in perfect harmony

Pianist Susan Tomes is both a fine musician and a marvellous communicator. Her recital on Sunday in Perth’s Concert Hall, part of the Piano Sundays series, was both enlightening and informative.

She adds incisive dissection of piano works to their eventual performance, and thus opens up works that even the most concise programme notes can’t come near to.

She’s a pianistic historian, and her love of an affinity of music and musicians – in this case Haydn and Beethoven – makes concert-going even more worthwhile.

Her first dissection was of Haydn’s F minor variations but few of the audience would have identified the strong F major influence in the work, had she not been so explicit.

Allied to this complete oneness with the work and the composer was a technique totally suited to this genre – lightness of touch, dexterity and if she let the music do the talking, it was merely to emphasise what she had so eloquently described before.

While this constituted the first half of the concert, broken down into 30 minutes of illuminating talk and 15 minutes of perfect performance, the second half was no less enjoyable, albeit with less narration. Quite a nice touch, I thought, to combine Beethoven’s first sonata with Haydn’s last, both written in the same year – 1795.

While Beethoven toed the line in standard sonata structure, Haydn was more adventurous and thus his E flat major sonata had more content and invention. Not that Beethoven’s OP 2 No 1 sonata lacked in anything, and neither did Susan’s masterful interpretation.

Piano Sundays in Perth are always an enjoyable experience, but due to this slightly different take on proceedings this one deserves a special mention.