St John’s, Smith Square, 8 May 2013

A promising career as a concert pianist was cut short in 1990 as a result of a trapped nerve. Since then Angelo Villani has gradually worked towards a full return to the concert platform, and this was his first solo recital at St John’s, Smith Square. That he continues to show great promise is without doubt, but the concert was uneven in delivery and impact.

He opened very strongly, linking three Debussy preludes into what was effectively a lyric suite. La Terrasse des audiences du clair de lune, an unexpected rarity, was given a gentle, improvisatory approach, dwelling on the solitariness and loneliness of the composition rather than any potential romantic yearnings. This was in splendid contrast to The Girl with the flaxen hair, whose warm romanticism mirrored the cool deliberation of the opening prelude. Minstrels proved a suitably tongue-in-cheek conclusion though it highlighted the darker moments of the work with skill.

The following two Chopin nocturnes never quite came to life. A reserved, almost hesitant, approach to Op9 No1 never allowed the musical line to blossom and Op9 No2 seemed at times perfunctory in its lack of phrasing or clear dynamic structure.

Reminiscences of Tristan und Isolde was heralded as a premiere of a new concert paraphrase. In the event it was a short but dense arrangement of the Liebestod. It opened strangely with a musical line which is not in the opera, working its way towards the Tristan chord, after which it moved rapidly towards a combination of the orchestration for the love duet and that for the Liebestod. It was difficult to tell what was in any sense new in this arrangement, and the phrasing only occasionally came close to the over-powering impact of the work in the theatre.

This ambivalence towards the works being played continued in the second half. Angelo Villani obviously has a great deal to offer, but this concert only went a small way towards proving it. BH