Leon McCawley (piano). Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham. 17 November 2024,

5✩✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff.

“A thoughtfully crafted, brilliantly executed recital”

I don’t know where the one-hour Sunday morning piano recital was invented but it would be nice to think (wishfully) that it was Nottingham.  Leon McCawley was the second recitalist this season, with an instinctive grasp of the sort of programme which works in this context.  It helped that he came with impressive qualifications: a multiple prize winner (Leeds, Vienna etc), having performed just about everywhere, recording extensively and managing to fit in a professorship at the Royal College of Music.

His programme certainly fitted the bill.  First of all, it was exactly one hour in length, almost to the second.  And it had all those ingredients to which audiences are most susceptible on Sunday mornings, including delightfully succinct (but informative) chats before each piece.

It was a good idea to start with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 2  as it reflects the young composer at his wittiest.  The first movement is full of short, pithy ideas which have to be performed with razor-sharp timing if they are to make an impact.  It is also full of surprises: sudden rests, lots of lulling the audience into a state of false security before the musical equivalent of hiding behind bushes and leaping out to make them jump.  Beethoven also sends musical rockets into space, with the pianist racing up the keyboard to prove that he has practised his scales.  Leon McCawley obviously shares Beethoven’s musical sense of humour and has both the technique and timing to make this mischievous music really tell. 

He was equally good when the music calls for a very different approach.  The slow movement was noble and full of high seriousness.  The scherzo was charming and the finale witty, graceful and distinguished by carefully calculated dynamic contrasts and precise ornamentation.

Next came one of Rachmaninov’s Etudes-tableaux (Study-pictures), a sad, poignant piece which the composer said evoked the sea and seagulls, although most people wouldn’t want to be that specific.  Leon McCawley managed all the music’s fierce technical demands with apparent nonchalance and injected it with a vivid sense of drama and emotional intensity.

The final two works on his programme could hardly have brought a greater contrast: the monumental arrangement by Franz Liszt of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in A minor for Organ (in which Bach’s complex musical architecture emerged with breath-taking clarity) and finally Mendelssohn’s Rondo Capriccioso, Op 14, a piece which fuses a lushly romantic opening with the composer’s trademark fairyland style, with lots of delicate dancing and lighter-than-air musical acrobatics. 

As an encore Leon McCawley played more Rachmaninov: the sadly lyrical Prelude in G, Op 32 No 5.  It brought to an end a recital whose programming was as thoughtful as its execution was brilliant.

Leon McCawley playing in the Sunday Morning Piano Series at the Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham.