Simone Tavoni at Chichester

 Simone Tavoni, Chichester Cathedral, May 13

Without any solid statistics to verify the claim, I'd guess that C19th music remains the most often played in C21st concerts. It is those composers that somehow best represent for us the general idea of the role, as Keats might seem somehow the quintessential poet. Whether we like them, or consider ourselves like them, or not they seem to express something to us about who we think we are.

Simone Tavoni began pensively in the lingering phrases of Mendelssohn's Fantasie, op. 28, before it became a comfortable moderato and ended with flighty verve. The Nocturne from A Midsummer Night's Dream was restrained and benefitted from Simone's sensitive touch.

Three Mazurkas by Chopin were miniatures tinged with melancholy but the 'big picture' was Rachmaninov's Sonata no. 2, in B flat minor, immediately promising the torrents that were to include church bells and any amount of 'agitato' in its first movement. The second was tentative and restless, the audience attentive and arrested by an intensity not heard in the previous pieces and the Allegro molto was still more dramatic than rhapsodic as it developed towards its crashing end. Simone Tavoni's finely modulated performance thus covered a range of the acceptable face of Romanticism. Perhaps Rachmaninov was where it all led to in the end but if some of us might think we can find aspects of ourselves in the C19th masters, fewer of us are likely to claim such extravagance to conceive, or play, anything on such a grand scale.

We might imagine we know who we are but we know not what we may be.