Thomas Kelly at St Mary’s Perivale
Masterly playing from the Golden Age
Masterly playing from Thomas Kelly not only for his unique sense of colour and style but for his musicianship that guided us through everything he played with an architectural shape and aristocratic sense of style that marks him out as one of the most exciting young musicians of his generation .
He and Benjamin Grosvenor are magicians of the keyboard as the great pianists were in the golden age of piano playing.The era of Rachmaninov, Lhevine, Rosenthal Godowsky or Moiseiwitch and in our day Stephen Hough. A piano that is no longer a percussion instrument but a kaleidoscope of magical sounds that are created by the greatest of illusionists.S ubtle use of the pedals and above all a sense of touch that can find infinite gradations in every note. The famous Matthay touch but also the pedal of Anton Rubinstein that he described as the soul of the piano.
A magnificent recital that was a lesson in musicianship and phenomenal technical control. The sounds he brought to Respighi’s Notturno played as an encore were the stuff that dreams are made of.
