Gig review: International piano summit

Published on Friday 7 August 2009 19:41

INTERNATIONAL PIANO SUMMIT ***** COMMUNITY CENTRE, NAIRN

IT MAY have been a musician down (pianist John Bunch was forced to call off due to illness) and have had a tenor sax star lost in transition (Scott Hamilton, who had a flight cancelled), but the Nairn International Jazz Festival still pulled a magical evening out of the hat on Thursday. Everything went according to plan – in fact, it went even better than planned, because an extra piano materialised towards the end of the hitherto two-piano concert.

This summit meeting involved veteran American wizard Dick Hyman, plus younger German pianists Chris Hopkins and Bernd Lhotzky – in other words, the three pianists who had wowed Edinburgh audiences earlier in the week with their games of "musical pianos". For their Nairn reunion, they were joined by the similarly nimble-fingered Rossano Sportiello, with sensational results.

Of course, the numbers that involved all four pianists were the most exciting – and the most fun to watch, as a certain amount of contorting and Marx Brothers-like horseplay took place as the musicians arranged sheet music so that two pianists could read it at a time, and arranged arms and torsos so that complex duets were feasible.

Among the highlights of the many different line-ups within this quartet was a beautifully delicate duet by Lhotzky and Sportiello on George Shearing's Children's Waltz, Hyman and Hopkins's hard-swinging Opus 1/2, and Sportiello's sublime solo version of Wonder Why, which was so romantic that the old couple next to me were moved to hold hands.