Rachel Cheung (piano). Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, 12 October 2025, 5☆☆☆☆☆. Review: William Ruff.

Photo credit: Royal Concert Hall.

Rachel Cheung (piano). Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, 12 October 2025,

5☆☆☆☆☆. Review: William Ruff.

“Rachel Cheung delivers a perfectly planned recital with grace and fiery virtuosity.”

The new season of Sunday morning piano recitals was launched by Rachel Cheung, who had flown in from Hong Kong especially for this Nottingham performance.  And it’s not as if she’s desperate for work: she’s in demand everywhere, having won awards and rave reviews in Asia, Europe and America.  One of the many feathers in her cap is the Audience Prize in the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, one of the highest accolades that the USA has to offer a classical musician.

Her Sunday morning programme couldn’t have been better judged for a season launch.  Anyone new to the Nottingham Classics Piano Series would have been delighted and encouraged by the mix of great (and generally familiar) music together with dazzling virtuosity.  There was an added ingredient too: Rachel’s bubbly personality, evident not only at the keyboard but when chatting to the audience about the repertoire.

There’s no better-known piano classic than Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, with which she began.  Its opening movement is its most famous, calmly rippling and needing ‘to be played throughout with the utmost delicacy’ (Beethoven’s own words).  Rachel certainly did that, managing to make the music sound new-minted, daring in its flouting of the musical rules of the time it was written.  The second movement was conveyed as a fleeting, graceful dance whereas the finale could hardly have been more bracing.  It was tautly driven and given full throttle, Rachel’s gloves-off approach emphasising the physical power of one of Beethoven’s stormiest last movements.

Next came Schumann’s Fantasiestücke (Fantasy-Pieces), eight in number and each with descriptive titles, such as ‘In the Evening’, ‘Troubled Dreams’ and ‘The End of the Song’.  Rachel delivered them with an unerring sense of poetic storytelling, in playing both rich and transparent.  The contrasts between pieces were beautifully handled, as when the impetuous energy of Aufschwung (Soaring) gave way to the tender yearning of Warum? (Why?)

The advertised part of the programme ended with Liszt’s Waltz on Themes from Gounod’s opera Faust, a combination of greatest hits from the opera served up for the piano by one of music history’s supreme virtuosos.  Liszt’s demands seem super-human, but Rachel Cheung took them in her stride, her hands (for those lucky enough to have a clear view of the keyboard) disappearing in a blur of musical athleticism.  Nothing less than phenomenal and all-embracing technical mastery is sufficient for this sort of music – and Rachel has that in spades.  Evocative music combined with fistfuls of notes flung with joyous abandon towards those listening: no wonder the audience cheered.

This huge ovation was rewarded with two encores: Ravel’s Jeux d’Eau, the composer’s playful, sensuous evocation of cascading fountains and Erik Satie’s Gymnopédie No 1, a gentle, melodic, lilting (yet musically ingenious) waltz.  Once again Rachel Cheung demonstrated her musical judgement as well as fine playing.  This wasn’t her first appearance in the Sunday Piano Series, having first played at the RCH in 2018.  And if the audience this Sunday has its way, she will be back again.

Rachel Cheung, playing in the Nottingham Classics Sunday Piano Series at the Royal Concert Hall.