Mark Bebbington, Kendal Town Hall

IN REFLECTIVE mode at the end of a recent Midday Concert Club recital I came to three conclusions. One: the programme just completed had been rather frantic and unbalanced; two: Mark Bebbington is a superb pianist; and three: acoustics downstairs in the town hall are similar to those upstairs (at least when only a piano is involved). I say this because I frequently have cause to comment critically on this issue.

Haydn’s Piano Sonata in C HobXV1/50 had the nature of a curtain raiser i.e. a preface to the main performance. It was certainly not that; how much more effective would it have been to have heard it in the middle of the programme, where it would have broken up the sonic experiences provided by César Franck, Liszt and three Gershwin encores!

Bebbington’s view of Haydn was near-perfect. It possessed a never-overstated classical authenticity; his formidable technique enabled him to deliver clarity of texture, precision, delicacy of touch in the most rapid of scalic passages, wonderful dynamic control and acute phrase-shaping plus a most compelling sense of timing.

All of these characteristics were present, needless to say, during the remainder of the programme - a barrage of late Romantic passion in the shape of Franck’s Prélude, Chorale and Fugue and two operatic transcriptions by Liszt - one from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, the other from Verdi’s Rigoletto. Bebbington regards the Franck piece as one of the great piano works of the late 19th Century; he certainly put all his pianism, all his musicianship, into attempting to convince us of the truth of that belief. It is a powerful work and Bebbington did his utmost to portray its quality. But, I wonder…?

Music students in the 1950s regarded Liszt with suspicion - an impresario, a publicist, not a real musician. Today, things are different, but remnants of that suspicion persist. Bebbington himself talked of “very fine boundaries existing between good and bad taste.”

So be it - but what superb performances we witnessed!

Brian Paynes