Elena Toponogova in Chichester

 Elena Toponogova, piano, Chichester Cathedral, July 2nd

It's been a long time since we rock'n'rolled. It's been 18 months, actually, with only the brief but brilliant oasis of two recitals by Angelina Kopyrina in Portsmouth last September. Just the pleasure of being back was enough but it didn't take long to remember why one goes - because it's tremendous.

The support act was an excellent exhibition of paintings by Michele Griffiths, here,

Michele Griffiths

Chartres was a favourite but there was much to admire in the cathedral stone work and light in all of them. On a day when a bonus was hardly necessary to enhance the occasion, there still was one.

Elena didn't begin with rock'n'roll, though, or anything like it but she did begin where Angelina had left us, with Rachmanninov. Daisies, op 38 no.3 which she was rehearsing as I arrived to get a good seat in the reduced, distanced capacity, is the softest tinkling of a poem by Lotaryov that Elena read first as if to show the difference between music and poetry and how music is usually better at it.

Two of The Etudes Tableaux, again by Rachmanninov, began with no. 2, more rumbling and expansive, and then no. 5, the Sea and the Seagulls, was back in dreamier mode before developing more foreboding from the lower register.

Tchaikovsky's Intermezzo from the Nutcracker Suite was equally rhapsodic but with more notes and 'orchestration' before Elena made the case for Nikolai Medtner, who is not so well known, with the dappled light of Fairytale that shimmered like the Sonata-Reminicenza, op. 38 also did before the turbulent disturbance in the middle and faint echoes of Bach, perhaps, in the final passages. While this was an entirely Russian and Romantic programme, the notes assured us that Elena has won prizes for her Bach as well, which is good to know.

Of course, having been starved of live music for so long, we'd have loved to have had all of the Prokofiev Sonata no.2 rather than just the first movement but the 50 minutes was still enormously good value. The Prokofiev brought together much of what had gone before but with more C20th, Modernist fracturing of the lyrical flow with varying tempi and the dreaminess compromised but it looked forward, to beyond the lush Romanticism, and made a fine end to a well-thought out programme.

It was great to be back, sitting next to the much-loved Arundel Tomb, which I now realize is below a stained glass window featuring the dissolute organist and choir master, Thomas Weelkes to who I've recently been most grateful for providing the subject for a new poem, poems having been difficult to come by in recent months. Maybe more of that another time.

But thanks to Elena and all involved in organizing these things at Chichester. They should be appreciated as a luxury. It is a measure of how spoilt we are if we regard them as essential.