Hugh Tinney (piano)

Sonata in G Op 14 No 2 - Beethoven

Sonata in D Op 28 (Pastoral) - Beethoven

Sonata in F Op 54 - Beethoven

Sonata in F minor Op 57 (Appassionata) - Beethoven

The RDS's spring recital series, which opened on Monday, is topped and tailed with two all-Beethoven programmes by Hugh Tinney. The idea behind his choice of repertoire in both programmes is to place some of the most familiar sonatas of the Beethoven canon in the context of sonatas which, for one reason or another, are less frequently heard. It was surprising, then, given the contrasts Tinney was intending to highlight, that he played the early G major Sonata from Op 14 as if he wished to cast it somehow in the mould of big Beethoven. Performer and music seemed altogether better matched in the evening's central offerings, the demandingly elusive Pastoral Sonata, and the astonishingly idiosyncratic F major Sonata Op 54, which comes between the Waldstein and the Appassionata. The objective orientation of Tinney's approach reaped its richest rewards here.

Something of a sense of struggle is part and parcel of the Appassionata. But in Tinney's reading it produced a sort of distancing, intensified by the impression that control was at times very hard won. The evening as a whole showed some untypical instabilities in tempo (fluctuations tended to drift in tandem with dynamics), and the sense of effort in the Appassionata was at times very vivid. The effect in this most familiar of impassioned scenarios, was to create an impression of passion not so much lived as recounted.