Tyler Hay at St Mary`s Perivale

Very impressive performances of great assurance by Tyler Hay.

Only 23 he plays and talks with such authority he reminds me a great deal of the young Leslie Howard whose intellectual and pianistic abilities amazed Guido Agosti and many others from an early age .

Tyler another of the amazing talents from the school of Tessa Nicholson at the Purcell School.

Completing his studies with Frank Wibaut,student himself of Cyril Smith and the winner of the first BBC Piano Competition many years ago and now a distinguished teacher at the Royal Northern School of Music .

Winner of the esteemed Gold Medal at the RNCM as well as the Royal Overseas League and the Liszt Society Competitions.

A great intellect searching out always new scores to bring before the public.

On many occasions the most impossibly difficult scores of the great composer virtuosi of the past such as Liszt and his rival Thalberg.

In this he is very similar to that other fine pianist with a searching mind and world expert on Alkan and Thalberg Mark Viner (also from the school of Tessa Nicholson and another student of Cyril Smith Neil Immelman at the RCM)

Small world!

Tyler had found in the archive at the RNCM five boxes of the scores of that great pianist composer John Ogdon and had asked his widow for permission to perform them.

He will infact next week be recording some of them in Amsterdam ,in the presence of Ogdon’s widow the renowned pianist Brenda Lucas , for release on CD.

Today he chose to give us a sample of Ogdon’s Variations and Fugue.

One of the most difficult scores he has ever tackled of a pianist who came to the fore when he took the world by storm as joint winner with Vladimir Askenazy of the Tchaikowsky Competition in the 60’s.

An amazing career as a virtuoso performer playing also some of the most impossible scores of Busoni and his contemporary composer friends.

Such a genius was consumed by mental health problems and died whilst only in his early 50’s.

It has taken a young 23 year old with the capacity and intellectual curiosity of an Ogdon to present these unpublished scores to the public at last.

The Variations and Fugue an enormously complex piece requiring the most super human feats of pianism .

A work of great effect that held the audience in awe for the twenty minute duration

A wish to hear it a second time was not possible on this occasion so I much looking forward to the CD to get to know these neglected scores of one of the giants of our time and a student of my old piano teacher the much missed Gordon Green .

The programme started with a very rarely performed Tarantelle op 65 by Thalberg

( The great virtuoso rival of Liszt who amassed such a fortune and retired to Naples where recently his tomb was scandalously desecrated ) .

A short show piece of quite simple stucture played with all the virtuosity that it was required to show off .

The other works on the programme by Franz Liszt .

The rarely heard march like Ballade n.1 given a very rhythmic performance slightly lacking in the scintillating colours that are needed to bring this rather mundane march to life.

The famous Mephisto Waltz was given a very assured reading .

No histrionics or rhetoric this was a fine musicians reading maybe lacking in the demonic energy that Tyler had obviously reserved for the Ogdon that preceeded this group and left him and us rather drained.

The Liszt Variations on Bach’s Weinen,Klagen,Sorgen,Zagen .

A monumental piece written in memory of Liszt’s two children Daniel and Blandine that had tragically died.

Full of extraordinary colour with a great sense of the architectural line .

The choral a moving contrast for its stillness and austerity to the virtuoso outer sections.

A song with out words in F sharp minor showed off this fine pianists refined sense of balance and innate musicality .