Spring has sprung and it was a joy to be able to listen to Diana Cooper with playing of elegance, eloquence and mastery as she gave her debut recital for the Keyboard Trust.
A wide ranging programme from Beethoven to Granados taking in Mendelssohn and Chopin.
It was in Warsaw that her extraordinary talent was recognised as the live stream from the Chopin Competition was listened to by a vast public worldwide.
Diana opened with Beethoven’s first really important sonata, when genius takes his teachers legacy by the scruff of the neck and transforms it into a wonder of thunder and joy. Diana playing with dynamic drive but also glittering radiance where the unusually crystalline intricacy of Beethoven is contrasted with bursts of virtuosity and fire. It was however the Adagio where Diana combined aristocratic authority and whispered poetic beauty creating the same effect that this movement of genial originality would have had in Beethoven’s day.
Thunder and joy were contrasted with the Flashes and Glimpses, a contemporary sonata by a Croatian colleague Šimun-Čarli Botica . And what flashes there were with virtuosistico flourishes spread over the keys with remarkable ‘fingerfertigkeit’ as they contrasted with glimpses of pedalled radiance . A tour de force of playing and memory with impeccable playing of great conviction.
It was the same mastery that she brought to Mendelssohn’s scintillating Variations Sérieuses where the beauty of her playing was matched with breathtaking fearless virtuosity. Notes that were streams of sound, playing with whispered jeu perlé alternating with grandiloquent excitement. The poetic mastery that she also demonstrated with the Granados ‘Allegro de concierto’ that closed the programme.
Just two works by Chopin were enough to show us why she was so admired in Warsaw. A scrupulous attention to what Chopin wrote in the score shorn of tradition allowing Chopin’s genius to speak for itself . The first scherzo , so often used as a showpiece for mindless virtuosi was given by Diana such burning intensity that the Christmas Carol that Chopin quotes in the central episode became moments of inspiration that Diana played with disarming simplicity and whispered beauty .
The Waltz op 42 that she played as an encore was a lesson in the style and insinuating beauty that she had shared with us all evening .
An artist who listens to herself and can turn a tank into a aeolian harp, with the magnificent Steinway Concert grand in such a small space transformed into a vibrant poetic vehicle by someone who at last knows how to drive ( to quote Graham Johnson )
At the reception afterwards Tony Palmer, the distinguished film director, was demanding that an important agent should sign her up immediately.
A distinguished impresario did in fact offer her immediately after the concert an engagement in the South of France . The artistic directors too of the Keyboard Trust, invited her to close their Florentine season playing their annual gala recital on the 15th May in the Harold Acton Library. https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.com/2025/05/17/pavle-kristic-keyboard-trust-and-robert-turnbull-piano-foundation-italian-tour-refined-artistry-and-mastery/
Diana ‘s instant carisma and sense of communication has an intoxicating effect on her audiences as we experienced last night .
ChristopherAxworthy-MusicCommentary 