Louis Lortie in London playing Ravel and immediately there is magic in the air .A magnificent Bosendorfer piano with the name embossed in antique gold script as the sounds were indeed of the same quality.

Louis playing with the weight that only the greatest artists possess with a way of projecting the sounds at crucial moments with a simplicity and aristocratic authority.

A chamber work that rarely comes across as it did tonight with an orchestra inspired as they had also been in the world première of Richard Dubugnon’s sumptuous score of his Panem & Circenses.

But there was more magic in the air as Louis Lortie took us into his ‘Enchanted Garden ‘ in a sumptuous performance with only two hands and two feet of the last of the Mother’s Geese.
Laying down the gauntlet for the orchestra that were playing Ma Mère l’Oye’ immediately after or was he merely lighting the way for Ravel’s magical orchestration ? This was the real thing not the usual dry clinical Boulezian Ravel but a Ravel of true luminosity and colour .

Of course how could it be otherwise with a pianist who had been taught by a pupil of Alfred Cortot and a conductor Jean-Luc Tingaud who had been the assistant of Manuel Rosenthal himself a pupil of Ravel.

This was a dream performance of the piano concerto that only Vlado Perlemuter could have matched in my lifetime.There is the famous recording of Vlado playing the concerto with Horenstein in 1955 that is a lesson in what it really means to play with weight and where the pedals really are the soul of the piano. Vlado would often like Arrau play loudly with the soft pedal down to obtain a very particular nasal sound that is vert rare to hear these days.https://youtu.be/LEh8qGdhMa8?feature=shared.

Tonight we caught a glimpse of what the Ravel concerto can really sound like in the concert hall by musicians of an artistic pedigree so rare these days ‘just’ playing with the love and joy of sharing their music with us.

Little did the crowds in festive mood for the Chelsea Flower Show realise what a magic garden was being enacted just around the corner

Louis Lortie pays ‘Hommage à Fauré’ ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’

I am sure that Louis would appreciate my adding a performance by a pianist who he has taken under his wing and who was heard flying high in Rome last week

Luigi Carroccia ‘The poet of the piano’ Chopin Concerti op 11 and 21 in Rome Orchestra delle Cento Città directed by Luigi Piovano