The new season of Chichester Cathedral's lunchtime concerts began with energy and high Romantic risk-taking with a performance by David Malusa.
Mozart's Sonata K.311 is Eine Kleine mannerism to warm up the fingers, more moving in its second movement but trilling and ornamental in the finale leading to something more impassioned in the ending. Never less than charming and attractive, I had very much expected it to be the highlight with more adventurous pieces to come.
But if Mozart would be first choice at home on records, the rest of his programme lent itself better to the thrill of live performance. Scriabin's Sonata no. 4, Op. 30 begins in surprisingly dreamy, impressionistic mood but soon moves into territory more associated with Scriabin, which brought thoughts of Rachmaninov to mind with its expansive lyricism that developed into something stormier, given with some relish by Malusa, and impressing the usual big audience for one of these events in the hugely successful series. Here was a way to bash them round the ears and dispel any doubt that they were back at it again. Hold onto your hats.
But Liszt's Totentanz, which is a Dance of the Dead, only took up from where Scriabin had left off and Malusa was able to use the full range of the piano's resources, battering the bass notes, running up scales, suggesting the better-known big passages from Pictures At An Exhibition and keeping its main theme in mind while flirting apparently with the outskirts of madness with some stirring bravura. All of which, for once, made Mozart seem rather genteel, which in such company he is.
At 35 minutes, one is tempted to say that David could have provided something like a civilizing Bach Partita to clam our troubled spirits but I can't imagine anybody felt short changed and he left us like that, moved, unsettled or invigorated as we saw fit.
For once, these might not be pieces that I'll follow up and add to the collection because Mozart is the better-trained house guest but it is a recital I'm unlikely to forget in a hurry.
It is a fine thing that Pallant House Gallery is half price on Tuesdays, when I'm most likely to be in Chichester. Their exhibition of paintings 'inspired by' the writing of Virginia Woolf ends soon, this coming weekend in fact, but is worth seeing.
In the other rooms are work by the likes of Walter Sickert, always good, and some Keith Vaughan, from the estate of Peter Schaffer, whose dehumanizing of the human form is eerie but it is really about Virginia and the extended coterie of Bloomsbury at the moment.
Among the documents on display was a letter to Lytton Strachey, compelling for being exactly that. For better or worse, Virginia is now disproportionately lauded for her ideas about what it is, or was, to be a woman artist, which is fine but not as significant as what you do once you are one, at which she excelled.
The centrepiece is the portrait of Virginia by Vanessa Bell, next to which is a Vanessa self-portrait, who one doesn't imagine suffering fools gladly. I was interested in a quiet, pale interior by Gwen John very similar to a print I have on my front room wall, the difference being that this time she has the window open and so it is less claustrophobic.
Trains back from Chichester shouldn't be quite the counter-intuitive ordeal that they can be, it often being the best plan to go into Fratton so you can get another one back out to Cosham but, wearying though that can be, one doesn't mind when the trip has been so worthwhile.
