Eva Doroszkowska at the Menuhin Room

Eva Doroszkowska, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, June 14

Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. Well, after a brief season of Romantic rhapsody and rapture, they are back and this week in Portsmouth it's been Bach and now Mozart. I might even be in a minority these days but 'classical' and 'baroque' still seem like home fixtures while later C19th music is an adventure with all the risks and/or  rewards that might bring. 

Eva Doroszkowska demonstrated a wide-range of piano technique in her programme of 'moods'. This being a translation, I wondered if 'tempers' might be another word for them. Mozart's Sonata, K.310, in a minor key, is not one of his most delicate confections but it still involves a sparkling onrush in its first movement and halting ornamentation in its second before its enervated finale. He had already 'covered' at least three tempers, there often being more than one shade to anything he does.

Grieg's Moods, op.73, marked his birthday, due tomorrow when he would have been 182. Six short pieces started by contrasting brooding portents with a mercurial Scherzo impromptu and continued to ebb and flow through a possibly perilous Night Journey, flowing melodic pastiche of Chopin before the evocation of distance and echo in Mountaineer's Call. One big advantage in Romantic music is how they like to tell you what you are listening to in their titles.

But, really, the main interest for me was Lūcija Garūta, to add a further uncompromising Russian or Eastern European woman to the pantheon I'm accruing. Her Etudes for a Steinway with a Sostenuto Pedal is a great rarity in specifying such a thing and it wouldn't be advisable to attempt to play it without that third pedal. It's what Eva came to play. She's not all drama and she's not all introspection but here she deliberately went into an uncommon dimension. A Serious Melody made great use of both ends of the keyboard, too. A Fairytale began to luxuriate in the sustain and Bells insistently chimed over restlessness. But it was the final piece in which the notes lingered long after, and still will be doing for many of us. Over more agitation, except now in the top register, the sostenuto pedal cast a rare spell to make for a long 'finish', as in the aftertaste of a fine wine. It's not compulsory to end on climax and crescendo as the Likely Lads usually saw fit. This was an ending not quite as long as A Day in the Life by The Beatles on which the last piano chord went into a loop suggesting forever but it faded gradually.

Andrew McVittie's fine Menuhin Room series continues in good health, building up a strong cast of fine musicians, like Eva, who are glad to return to play the Steinway. Any doubts there might have been about its future are safely in abeyance well into next year with a great variety of music, not even all piano, lined up. It's a friendly place and more seats could be fitted in, I'm sure, without offending the Health & Safety regulations. Something for everybody, one might say, but all of it for some of them is probably more like it.