Ariel Lanyi (piano). Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, 16 November 2025, 5☆☆☆☆☆. Review: William Ruff.

Photo Credit: Royal Concert Hall.

Ariel Lanyi (piano).  Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham, 16 November 2025,

5☆☆☆☆☆., Review: William Ruff.

“A recital of intimacy, wit, brilliance and mystery from Ariel Lanyi.”

The pianist Ariel Lanyi, born in Jerusalem and now based in London, flew in from Germany to be in Nottingham on Sunday morning.  He started by telling the audience that his recent travels disprove two old chestnuts: that German trains always run on time – and that Germans have no sense of humour.

Humour was at the heart of the first piece on the menu: Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 16 in G.  It’s a highly unusual work but it needs an artist like Ariel to show us just how quirky it must have sounded to its first audiences.  It’s hard to believe that it dates from 1802, the same year that Beethoven had to face the prospect of total deafness.  However, rather than give in to despair, the composer wrote some of his most inventive, surprising music, including this Sonata, a work which bursts with wit, drama and one surprise after another.  Ariel Lanyi was brilliant at showing just how much Beethoven was pushing against musical boundaries.  It’s not often that classical music makes an audience laugh, but Ariel’s performance was impossible to resist.

Yes, it’s true that you probably need to be a musician to get all the jokes, but some of them are obvious to anyone.  The opening of the first movement, for instance, begins not with a grand theme but with more of a stumble in which the right and left hands are deliberately not together.  The music which follows is full of sudden shifts in dynamics, unexpected pauses, disrupted rhythms and a sense of comic uncertainty.  Beethoven leaves the funniest ideas till the end, fooling the audience repeatedly into believing that he has finished before starting again…and again.  Ariel Lanyi entered into the music’s mischievous spirit with relish.

The central Adagio grazioso was, by contrast, full of long, lyrical melodies, ornate trills and the atmosphere of an intense operatic aria.   And the finale brought Ariel Lanyi’s performance to a brilliant and cheerful conclusion via plenty of musical humour: sudden loud keyboard explosions and impish interruptions.  The music raced to the finishing line in ways both exhilarating and witty, Ariel’s razor-sharp timing making it all a delight to see and to hear.

The other work on the programme was Debussy’s second set of Preludes, twelve short, evocative, character pieces with enigmatic titles.  Debussy didn’t like being called a musical Impressionist, but you can see why the description stuck.  In each of these pieces he doesn’t so much tell a story as capture something much more elusive: a sensation, an image, an idea caught on the wing, a little world of suggestive sound.

Ariel Lanyi clearly loves this music.  It is a hugely impressive feat to play the entire set at one sitting…and from memory…but he did so immaculately.  It opens with ‘Mists’, its ghostly motifs appearing and dissolving before capturing the autumnal stillness of ‘Dead Leaves’. Debussy then whisks us off to Spain for a sudden burst of Andalusian passion.  Dancing fairies are then followed by a portrait of an American music hall performer, a capricious water sprite, Dickens’ Samuel Pickwick and an Egyptian funerary urn – on this kaleidoscopic tour of Debussy’s imagination.

This isn’t straightforward music at all.  Debussy completely reimagined the piano’s sound-world, exploring every subtle shade of musical colour which can be coaxed from the keyboard.  In his recital Ariel Lanyi captured the full range of Debussy’s intimacy, wit, brilliance, mystery and unfailing originality as he brought each Prelude into vivid focus. 

Ariel Lanyi, performing in the Sunday Morning Piano Series at Nottingham’s Royal Concert Hall.