Konstantin Lifschitz, London Piano Festival review: A master of colour

The ground-breaking venue hosts a thunderous performance from the Russian pianist

Konstantin Lifschitz (Sona Andreasyan)

Surveying the futuristic architectural landscape into which Kings Place now snugly fits, it’s easy to forget what a bold initiative this building was when it opened 10 years ago.

Entrepreneur Peter Millican bought the site at the bottom of the market in 1999 – a time when nobody else had seen its potential, when few other developers were interested in creating environmentally ‘green’ buildings, and when his idea for a building which was both a workplace and a place for cultural recreation was revolutionary. Now it’s humming with life, and provoking similar inner-city enterprises all over the country.

In striking contrast to those of London’s other chamber halls, its artistic programme is ground-breakingly radical; the London Piano Festival, to which it plays host, is one of its more traditional strands. This has become a major event in the musical calendar, thanks to the charismatic guests brought in by the pianistic duo who conceived it, Katya Apekisheva and Charles Owen.

Here it is the Russian pianist Konstantin Lifschitz’s turn in the spotlight. He begins with Schubert’s A minor sonata (D784). Schubert did not live to hear this work, but I doubt if he would have liked this thunderous and unremittingly bleak performance.

On the other hand, Lifschitz’s account of Janacek’s suite On an Overgrown Path feels intensely true to the idiom: the music’s dramatic stops and starts, its growls and screams, exhilaration and despair, its alternation between tentativeness and declamation – everything is there in bold, emotional close-up. And with Debussy’s first book of Preludes, Lifschitz shows what a master he is of colour, texture and line.

Tonight, tomorrow and into Sunday the show goes on: with Polish jazz from Leszek Możdżer, an illustrated Debussy lecture from Paul Roberts, and Couperin and Schumann from the mercurial Pavel Kolesnikov.

Until 7 October, Kings Place, londonpianofestival.com