James Lisney at Portsmouth Menuhin Room

 James Lisney, Portsmouth Menuhin Room, June 3

If Beethoven's Diabelli Variations were a horse they'd be by The Art of Fugue out of A Musical Joke. Beethoven seems to have thought the challenge of writing a variation on the waltz beneath him but then changed his mind and made an extravagant job of doing 33 of them and 'having a laugh' while he did it.

To stretch the turf analogy on Derby day, James Lisney rode Diabelli, a horse with talent to burn but with ideas of its own, like Frankie Dettori, finessing an impressive win from a demanding ride. It's a mischievous, rascally thing making endless jokes from what is really only three notes most of the time. Beethoven is showing off and won't stop. He goes on long after anybody else would have thought enough was enough, like a legendary Ken Dodd performance.

James was bold and almost brash, bringing out the caricature of the big gestures and grandiose mannerisms almost as if Beethoven was making fun of some of his own more grandstanding pieces. Sometimes deliberately simplistic and at others a pastiche of military styles, he eventually throws in an impersonation of Bach that is so close it could almost be put into The Well-Tempered Klavier and the likes of me would be none the wiser.

The problem, if there is one, with this is that if in the later stages Beethoven intended some serious reflection along the lines of 'our revels now are ended', it was too late. We have too long been going along with the joke to be expected to suddenly become all elegiac and Grosse Fuge about it. We've noticed the Bach, there must be some Mozart and so we could be forgiven for wondering if Haydn, Scarlatti or even maybe Schubert are hidden in these knockabout games. Tender as some later passages are, it's difficult not to hear them as tongue-in-cheek, too.

Many great works of literature are (allegedly) comic - Ulysses, Don Quixote, even Hamlet can be at times - but, even given Mozart's operas, witty, untroubled Haydn and Erik Satie, I'm not convinced music does it so well. James Lisney put in a blitzing, hugely impressive performance that was much appreciated by a well-informed audience, and me, too, but it was irony, satire and in-jokes that are something that words, for once, are better at than music. However, as long as you are in on the joke, it's tremendous entertainment light years ahead of those crowding Guildhall Square dressed unironically, as far as I could tell, for a Comic Book convention.

Zaniness must have its limits and Beethoven might have broken other boundaries but not those. In order to restore some sanity and heart's ease, though, James treated us to an encore of some Bach arranged by Alfred Cortot. One is glad of an excursion into mind-boggling variations from time to time but it's good to arrive back home safely.

I found, as part of the homework I did ahead of today, that Wikipedia tells us that the Diabelli Variations are,

considered to be one of the greatest sets of variations for keyboard along with J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations.

As it happens, that's what's up next in the Menuhin Room series, on July 1st with Danny Driver so we are lucky to have such a glorious opportunity to compare and contrast. For a certain kind of some of us, that's unmissable.