Piers Lane is a familiar figure to concert-goers and the Australian pianist returns next week under the happiest possible circumstances, to give a recital."You don't have to make any compromises with a recital," he says. "You can play just as you want to. You are always fitting in with others for concertos and chamber music but, in a recital, you can be yourself and that's a great joy."Lane's Tuesday programme is what one might expect from a pianist who is an indefatigable traveller on the highways and byways of Romantic music. Liszt is there, but as much for his spirit as for his own music - all you will be hearing is his arrangement of the slow movement from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony.Eugen d'Albert, whose arrangement of the great Bach C minor Passacaglia opens the evening, was Liszt's favourite pupil. "Liszt used to call him Albertus Magnus," Lane says. "And d'Albert went on to transcribe all the Bach organ works that his teacher didn't."Considering Lane has recorded a number of CDs of d'Albert's music for the Hyperion label, we can expect a definitive interpretation.
The Australian is thrilled to include Quasi-Faust by the eccentric Charles-Valentin Alkan. Again, this is a piece with crucial connections. "Alkan was Chopin's neighbour," Lane says, "as well as being a great friend of Liszt. In fact, the Quasi-Faust must have inspired the Liszt Sonata. It was written five years before the Liszt and shares some of the same melodic and rhythmic ideas."As for difficulty, the piece's title is a give-away. "It's demonic," he laughs. "It even has an eight-voice fugue."The second half of Tuesday's programme will be the complete cycle of Chopin Preludes, a rare privilege in this part of the world. "Everybody knows certain of the Preludes, but there are others that people won't recognise, as you don't get to hear them apart from as part of the whole set," Lane says. "They are a wonderful kaleidoscope of ideas and emotions and it's extraordinary to hear how Chopin feels about each major and minor key on the piano because he goes through all 24 just as Bach did in his Well-Tempered Clavier."Lane says he likes stories about the composers he plays and has thought about how Chopin might have played his own music. "Later in his life, he was frail. When he played in England towards the end, they complained they couldn't hear him at the back of the concert hall. In fact, his main criticism of other pianists was that they made the piano bark like dogs. He didn't like big-scale playing. His style was an intimate one; he drew people in rather than going out to meet them."PERFORMANCE Who: Piers LaneWhere and when: Raye Freedman Arts Centre, Epsom Girls Grammar School, Tuesday, (June 10), 7.30pm
