Leslie Howard at QPAC

It was really very exciting. My partner and I won two tickets to see Leslie Howard play at QPAC on Friday night. He was performing as part of the Queensland Music Festival, so it was great to be able to see him in concert. Apart from the fact that we actually won something (!!!), I love the piano and piano music.



This is Leslie Howard, playing Liszt (not the selection from the QPAC performance, though).


We only just made it. I was working in Melbourne all week and only landed back in Brisbane at 6:15pm. The concert started at 8, so I rushed home, got changed and we went straight back out. We got to the Concert Hall at QPAC just as they announced that the doors would be closing in two minutes. So we went straight in, sat down, and the concert started.

Howard started with Beethoven, followed by Liszt. I hadn't heard either of these selections before, which made for a nice change. (I'm not a huge consumer of classical music, so this wasn't really a surprise given the amount of music that Beethoven and Liszt wrote.) The Six Variations in F Major, opus 34 by Beethoven didn't really catch my imagination, but that's probably because I was still trying to calm down after racing to get there in time. The Liszt selection (Annees de pelerinage - Troiseme anne, S163) made more of an impression. Starting slowly, over the course of the seven pieces it did build into something that caught my imagination.

After the interval he played Borodins Petite Suite, followed by Sonata No.1 by Glazunov. Again, these were two pieces I'd never heard before. The Glazunov I thought was very good and a great piece to finish with.

One thing that did surprise me was that most of this music was relatively quiet and simple, in minor keys. It did have a rather downbeat feeling to it in that respect. So much of Beethoven and Liszt in particular are fast paced and quite extravagant in a lot of ways and these pieces were obviously some of their simpler and sparser works. The whole performance had a low key feeling to it as a result, at least for me.

Having said that, his playing was superb. He performed for two hours completely from memory (a trick I wish I could do!) and without missing a beat. It was overall a brilliant performance and I'm very glad we went.