He played the Bartok sonata magnificently.
Crystal clear decisive rhythms.
Deeply expressive second movement.
Spontaneous applause after the first movement and cheers at the end of the last.

The Bach/Kempff played with a clarity that took me by surprise as I have become used to more romantic overpedalled performances.
This was startlingly shorn of rhetoric and sugary rubatos but so much more expressive because of it.

He introduced the Schumann Fantasie himself and gave a very fine performance as you would expect from a disciple of Joan Havill
A great sense of rhythmic drive and overall sense of line.
I would have tried to link the second movement to the third.
But this is a real thinking musician like Ivan Krpan that does not move if not convinced.

The coda of the second movement was very secure and musically shaped.
Slightly missing the magic that this fine but small Steinway just did not have.
The ending was beautifully controlled and the final crescendo/accelerando well judged.

It is rare to find such a well thought out and finely planned performance of this much maligned masterpiece.

An encore.
Two for the price of one!
Scriabin nocturne op.9 became the study op. 42 n.5.
He had reworked the study in a day at my request not having played it for some time.

He has more than confirmed the successes that Jacques Samuel, Guildhall and Padua have already demonstrated.
Helped and admired by Angela Hewitt he is a major player in an overfull profession.
He is also very intelligent and simpatico.
His father is a writer of psychology in Florence ….his mother is Australian.
This is what I wrote about him in Padua which also talks about his first remarkable teacher in Florence.