Angelina Kopyrina at Lunchtime Live!

 Angelina Kopyrina, Portsmouth Cathedral, Jan 23

Portsmouth Cathedral has capacity for plenty but the intimate St. Thomas's Chapel not quite so many. It didn't have room for many more today, though, even on an inclement January Thursday, which goes to show that when there is a box office performer to be seen and heard, the box office benefits.

Being the earliest of arrivals, always on an earlier bus rather than risking anything later being delayed, I make claim to a couple of choice seats early doors to see and hear from which is an education in itself. I don't want to say which of the array of musicians in the Portsmouth catchment area is greatest, favourite or best and don't need to beyond being glad to have them all but, were there to be such a prize to be awarded, anybody hoping to win it would need to be adjudged ahead of Angelina Kopyrina.

The Beethoven Sonata no. 18 is a gorgeous thing not quite on the grand scale of some later such pieces. I'm sure we'd have all gone home well impressed and happy enough by that. For the first time in several years I made no notes of suitable adjectives to describe the piece or the playing of it. I'd rather watch the hands, for once be immersed in the performance rather than the surrogate hack writing about it I do later. It was civilized, ornamented, fluent and exactly why Beethoven is essential without him becoming too glowering or tormented.

But in the event that was the first course of a meal that was to prove so much richer and deeper. Prokofiev must be a bit put out that it's a portrait of Shostakovich I now have on my wall over there to my left. His Sonata no. 7, op. 83, made for a powerful statement of intent.

At first in military phrasings but then more mysterious and captivating, the third movement was next marked 'precipitato', which suggests rain. I'm finding 'collapsed' and 'fallen' in dictionaries while the musical term, so it says here, is 'hurried' or 'impetuous'. But while reviews of music afterwards can't conjure it back to life, neither do these vague directions do any justice to what it sounds like in a performance like this.

We had heard Angelina handle the tentative, sensitive wonder of the slow tempi and been transfixed but, if art is enlarged by contrasts, the bombardment of the last couple of minutes of the Preciptato was another thing entirely. The Kopyrina we have been led to expect and gladly turn up for. Prokofiev, and Angelina, made their point. The Complete Piano Sonatas will be on their way to this house asap

I understand there's another of those storms they give a name to due here tomorrow. This one's called Eowyn. I don't enjoy them much, powerful and elemental though they may be. I'll probably take one look at the best it can do and think, oh really - but I was at Angelina Kopyrina doing her Prokofiev so...what, exactly.

I can bring along a few interested friends to a gig like this, confident that they won't be disappointed, far more confident than if I gave them the name of a horse to back. I turned and looked at them and it was obvious they were thinking what I was.