No-one can say that the Three Choirs Festival doesn’t look after its own, even when they bring fond reminders after moving on to pastures new.
This was certainly true in Thursday morning’s recital in the elegant, airy ambience and acoustic of Hereford’s comfortable Shirehall, pianist Mark Bebbington, who seems consistently at the top of his form, delivering a brilliantly-constructed programme of impressionistic influences.
Liszt was at the heart of the sequence, his world-stopping ‘Les Jeux d’eau a la Villa d’Este’ equally heart-stoppingly performed, and the only non-derivative piece spawning the surrounding works successively influencing each other: Debussy, Ravel, John Ireland, each impressionistic piece given great colour by Bebbington’s awesome command of weight and touch, as well as his thoughtful pacing of tempo rise and fall and his habitual consummate pedalling -- not the least of which was his ability to conjure magically sustained endings.
All of this came to together in the finale, the premiere of the Piano Sonata by David Briggs, a one-time Three Choirs organist of Gloucester Cathedral.
Coming in at a substantial 27 minutes, this is a three-movement work of the ‘echt’-sonata school (no truck with Liszt’s single movement and its followers), and makes well-worked use of a minimum of material. It is well-structured, with rhapsodic climaxes approached and departed, moving from decidedly organ-like textures to a finale bursting with pianistic high jinks at the most demanding technical level, Bebbington brilliant throughout.
But this seems a work communicating more to the composer than to others, full of references to his favourite listens, and I caught too many to mention here. Mark Bebbington underwent a labour of love in getting it under his fingers; I do hope he gets the opportunity to make use of it again.
