Ethan Loch (piano).  Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham. 26 January 2025,

5✩✩✩✩✩ Review: William Ruff.

“Revelatory playing from the extraordinary Ethan Loch.”

There is much more to an Ethan Loch recital than the music you hear him play.  That is extraordinary enough: limpid clarity, the widest palette of tonal colour, amazing precision and a formidable technique.  However, he has been blind since birth and that fact lifts the experience of hearing him play to a completely different level.  Dividing lines between the senses seem to fall away: it’s as if it’s possible to see through the ears.

Ethan was born in 2004 and won the Keyboard Category of the BBC’s Young Musician competition when he was 18.  On Sunday his choice of programme was wide-ranging: classical wit, romantic passion, impressionistic tone-painting – all in one hour.  Haydn came first: his Piano Sonata No 60.  Like so much of the composer’s music, it is full of whimsical humour, light on its feet in the outer movements and tenderly poignant in the middle.  Ethan clearly loves Haydn’s ingenuity and brought extraordinary clarity to his performance.  Each strand of the musical argument was crystal-clear, even when ideas chase each other at speed.  In the slow movement his response dug deep into Haydn’s capacity for profundity.

Three virtuoso examples of French impressionism followed: Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau and Debussy’s, Les Collines d’Anacapri and Feux d’artifice.  All were rich in atmosphere and vividly pictorial, whether capturing the games of a river god, showing us trees bending on an Italian hillside, or treating the audience to a spectacular fireworks display.   Ethan Loch’s performance of the three pieces was so full of vivid ‘imagery’ that it was hard to believe that the pictures sprang from the fingers of someone who has never been able to see.  Here were intimacy, wit, brilliance, mystery and originality – all brought into sharp focus by superb playing.

The final ‘official’ work on the programme was Chopin’s 3rd Piano Sonata.  This is another work which covers a vast emotional span.  Its opening movement seems proudly aristocratic, the second fleetingly mercurial, the third intensely meditative and the fourth explosively volcanic.  Ethan Loch seemed completely at one with the music, applying not only an enormous range of colour, but also finding beauty and drama in every bar.

His encore was an improvisation, made up on the spot and incorporating fragments of musical ideas spanning hundreds of years and a wide range of styles.  It was an exhilarating way to end what had been, in so many ways, a revelatory recital.

Ethan Loch, playing in the Sunday Morning Piano Series at Nottingham’s Royal Concert Hall.

This concert was dedicated to the memory of Peter Brien, a writer and musician who, over many years, had greatly enhanced the enjoyment of Nottingham’s classical music audiences with his insightful, witty programme notes.