Today's concert at the Queen's Hall was with the Venezuelan pianist Gabriel Montero. Now thirty-eight, she is accustomed to playing in public, having given her first performance at the age of five. Winner of numerous piano competitions, including the International Chopin Piano competition, she is a virtuoso pianist who plays with an extraordinary passion.
Utterly focused, she sat down at the piano stool, flexed her fingers, adjusted a strand of hair to camouflage her vision from the audience, and began. The first piece she played was Busson's complicated arrangement of Johann Sebastian Bach's Chaconne in D minor where the bass notes resounded magnificently throughout the hall. Next we heard two Chopin Ballades - No 3 in A flat and No 4 in F minor. Chopin is a passionate composer and she expertly brought out the moods in the pieces. In Debussy's L'isle joyeuse, her fingers effortlessly rolled up and down the keyboard. Schumann's Carnaval Op 9, which is seldom heard, is described as a "masked ball" - character illustrations composed for the piano. And the last piece on the programme was Mephisto Waltz by Franz Liszt. While he is a notoriously difficult composer to play, she performed a dexterous rendition of the piece.
It was pure entertainment and at the end, as an encore, she asked the audience if someone could give her a tune to improvise. A man stood up and sang the first bar of Flower of Scotland, the audience followed suit. She had never heard the song, but we were treated to a five-minute fabulous improvisation of the Scots "National Anthem." A great ending, to a great performance.