Brighton Festival - our reviewer goes out and about in search of the best classical music

At Brighton Dome Concert Hall –

Thursday 19 May (1pm), pianist Alexei Grynyuk – Mendelssohn, Variations Serieuses Op54; Schubert, Impromptus in Cm Eb Gb Ab Op90 D899; Schubert arr Liszt, Litanie for All Souls Day; Liszt, Hungarian Rhapsody No 9 The Carnival at Pest.

(7.30pm), London Symphony Orchestra, guest leader Jaha Lee, guest conductor Marta Gardolińska, flute Gareth Davies. Lili Boulanger, D’un Matin de Printemps (of a Spring Morning); Marc-André Dalbavie, Flute Concerto; Tchaikovsky, Symphony No 1 in Fm Op36; Valentin Silvestrov arr Andreas Gies, Prayer For Ukraine.

War, we know, violates and tramples over art. Paintings, sculptures, architecture, writing, can be stolen, confiscated or destroyed. Etherially resilient, though, is music. But while it can live through and defy or confound conflict, its performing musicians of fighting nations suffer attempted silencing or use as political instruments.

Thursday at Brighton Festival looked in on this as art got sucked into international politics and the world situation around the Russian and Ukrainian engagement. The evening orchestral concert by a leading London orchestra marked out Russian-French bonding, but sided with Ukraine.

The Swiss-based Russian pianist Dmitry Shishkin, a recent Tchaikovsky Competition prize-winner agreed to withdraw from the Lunchtime concert, with 101 tickets already sold. Alexei Grynyuk, the London-based, Kiev-born Ukrainian with British citizenship, was successfully invited instead. He attracted 228, whose donations raised more than £200 for the DEC Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal.

Why not Shishkin at Brighton Festival 2022? A Festival spokesperson answered: “The decision for him to withdraw was mutually agreed by the Festival and his team. The Festival very much hope to welcome Dmitry Shishkin to perform at a future Brighton Festival event.”

Why invite a Ukrainian instead of, say, a Syrian or another nationality? “Brighton Festival regularly hosts international performers across its programme, including artists from Syria and Ukraine.” Had the Government or Arts Council England or any other funder leant on you not to present a Russian? “Brighton Dome & Brighton Festival are responsible for all decisions regarding its programme.”

Shishkin’s slot of Bach-Busoni, Scarlatti and Rachmaninov’s great Second Sonata was filled by Grynyuk with no Russian music. Guest London Symphony Orchestra conductor, the 34-year-old Pole, Marta Gardolińska, spoke in a concert programme brochure statement of “horrific attack” on “a country with a rich and proud culture, an incredible force of spirit and a sense of beauty”.

While similar words about Ukrainians could also be said about ordinary Russian people and their art, she programmed this concert to close with Ukrainian music, in asking the audience “to commemorate the victims and pray for the brave defenders of freedom and our Western values”.

LSO performed Prayer For Ukraine – composed by 85-year-old Kiev native Valentin Silvestrov in 2014, just after the fighting in south east Ukraine actually began. With graphic detail now universally known about the battling and its victims, this music, for this moment, felt too at peace with itself, rather too comfortable.

Peculiarly so, for anyone without unflinching faith. But according to an importantly informative programme note about the 2013-2022 Crimea/Donbas Ukraine-Russia confrontation, it’s originally a yearning and devotional choral piece asking for protection, power, faith and hope. And by an avant-garde composer who, when Soviet-denounced, switched to neo-Romanticism, then later in 2014 personally witnessed peaceful demonstrations in Kiev, then subsequent shooting.

Performed here in act of solidarity, to me Prayer For Ukrainewas gently nocturnal, if prayerful, in beautifully subdued colours from strings partnered in turns by low flutes, harp, then low brass, and discreet soft cymbal and triangle. Possibly there were more sinewy options for LSO within Silvestrov’s four-fold Majdan Cycle of Cycles, of which Prayer for Ukraine is a component part.

In its final silence, Gardolińska on the rostrum bowed her head and there was a connectively long audience silence. This qualified for inclusion among Brighton Festival orchestral history’s potent moments.

It served also as a sedative after Tchaikovsky’s penetratingly violent assault from his own Fate, in his Fourth Symphony, which commences his trio of large-scale musical struggles against his personal oppressor. The programme brochure boasted an admirably illuminating note on this by David Fanning. And LSO’s fist was raising a red-hot implement to gouge the emotions.

While heavy brass and percussion stood ready-armed as the aggressor, Gardolińska focused on the sound and presence of her strings – surely Tchaikovsky’s own voice in this drama. She packed closely her fiddles and viola desks, distancing slightly the cellos and basses, behind which prowled the sniping timpani of Nigel Thomas.

The other explosive percussion forces lay in wait on the opposite side of the stage, ready to complete their pincer assaults with the kettle drums. Gardolińska’s profoundly unsettling first movement and her disconsolate second were both applauded. The symphony conclusion was noisily greeted.

The audience had seen a conductor new to them in action with an economy of flowing gesture, although in The Dome, without the choir seats available, behind a conductor’s back people have less chance to appreciate a conductor’s vital facial communication.

Tchaikovsky was a frequent visitor to Paris from St Petersburg or Moscow. Russian and France have long enjoyed each other’s artistic influence. The famous Parisian Boulanger sisters were mothered by a Russian Princess. Nadia’s teaching is long legendary. Lili’s short-lived, illness- plagued life and compositional career is now becoming properly respected and admired.

Her untypically happy Of A Spring Morning was a smiling jaunt out into the garden and countryside in various tempos of walk, skip and jump. Wildlife voiced its own pleasure, sound and scenery came in easy textures, the excursion brief as an errand run from a farm to a general store and back.

In a concert first half of just 23 minutes’ music, after Boulanger’s hors d’oevres of French flavour came 17 minutes of frequently enthralling modern French Flute Concerto swap and partnership between the LPO and their own illustrious flautist Gareth Davies. Dalbavie’s is a constant flurrying of alternating speed then stillness, of outburst then soliloquy, bringing often stirring mass-orchestral sonority or sensual flautist loneliness.

The music created something near-tangible and ever differing. Is it a hive of swarming bees? A murmuration of starlings? A charm of goldfinches? An unexpected landscape feature? A sudden expanse of still water? A wash of warm rain? A bright sun teasing us from behind cloud? A changing sky of ever-new colour?

LSO, Gardolińska and Davies gave us a series of sensations and visions, beneficially abstract, to make us feel this was suddenly our favourite piece of French music – even though it’s already 16 years old.

A few years back, Alexei Grynyuk got one of the biggest gigs going in chamber music when violinist Nicola Benedetti and cellist Leonard Elschenbroich sought to complete their new Piano Trio line-up. Seeing him with them, and also in duo with Benedetti, you could tell he was new diamond. Seeing him solo for the first time, now confirmed I was watching a special individual.

No fashionable haircut or distinctive clothes, bespectacled, slightly plump, it was fun to imagine him with sideburns and a bat-winged collar, looking just like Franz Schubert playing his celebrity solo spot at a Viennese Schubertiad.

Grynyuk spends time looking upward into space, and at certain moments turns to half-face the audience. His whole upper body frequently seems to expresses the music. His hands make pointed withdrawals from, or returns to, the keyboard, creating theatre between two participating characters. And he’d instantly throw back his jacket before a loud physical attack.

He served up Schubert’s first Impromptus set as though he owned them, and was giving us a live revelation of how they really are – during in a time of the work’s increased adoption by other pianists, some showing less individuality while over-performing or imposing conventionally-assumed gravitas. Grynyuk, like an actor, made them converse with the listener: to ask, propose, suggest or explore; to comfort or entertain, to gently tease, too, with rubato adding to these Impromptus’ expressive and questing feel – most especially in No 1.

Grynyuk’s sense of creative spontaneity was paramount. A close second was his invitation for us to discover. His No 2 had a furious second section and poured for its whole length in fleet and continual motion. No 3 flowed and sang like a divine stream. And No 4 visited both deep emotion and pure fantasy.

There were plenty of chances to spot Grynyuk’s lauded gradation of pianissimo colour, in a programme calling for a courageous virtuosity and tempting an element of showmanship kept under lock and key in much of his collaborative duo and trio piano work.

Mendelssohn had given him a serious and varied workout in its continuous switches of mood and necessary characterisation. All of which got Grynyuk’s table ready for the Hungarian Liszt’s substantial and elated Pest Carnival depiction, where Grynyuk’s calibre and artistry brought off its hyper-powered, near-visual evocation in a hard-won triumph.

The audience applause paid Grynyuk his dues although without the vocal responses I suspect he’d have got in an evening performance at Brighton Festival. Perhaps, for most, it was simply too stunning to stomach fully before lunch.

Richard Amey

Have you read: Grace: why tonight's episode confirmed Brighton-based detective series as essential viewing

Have you read: Downton Abbey - those all important Sussex connections

Have you read: Grace: why Roy Grace creator Peter James is so delighted with John Simm’s portrayal of his Brighton-based detective

Have you read: Petworth Festival: This is when it is being held, here are the names of those appearing, and this is how to obtain tickets

Have you read: Hastings panto announced

Have you read: Exploring the great joys of the South Downs Way

Have you read: So many reasons to celebrate as Chichester's Pallant House Gallery marks 40 yearsHave you read: Search begins for 2022 Sussex Young Musician

Have you read: The Art of Chichester: 60 Years of Creativity - major new exhibition

Have you read: Everything you need to know: Chichester Festival Theatre summer 2022

A book about loss and hope

A remarkable tale of recovery from a rare form of cancer