Daniel Lebhardt (piano), Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham | 22 February 2026 ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Review by William Ruff

Photo credit: Royal Centre

Daniel Lebhardt (piano)

Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham | 22 February 2026,

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Review: William Ruff

“Playing of intellectual strength and poetic insight.”

Daniel Lebhardt is a Hungarian pianist who has notched up an impressive tally of prizes, critically acclaimed recordings and performances with some of the world’s finest orchestras, conductors and chamber musicians.  He has performed in the Sunday Piano Series before, but that was nine years ago, perhaps an indication of just how busy he has been in the interim.

Even before he played a note in Sunday’s recital his insight was obvious to anyone listening to his introductory comments, brief yet illuminating, suggesting links between the pieces in his programme.  What the Beethoven sonata and the works by Schumann and Brahms all have in common is that they’re difficult to pin down, their meanings sometimes hard to grasp.

He opened with Beethoven’s Sonata No 17, known as ‘The Tempest’ – although it’s not clear why.  It’s certainly dramatic and has some magical moments but Beethoven may have been less that serious when he suggested that Shakespeare’s play was the key to unlock his sonata’s mysteries.  Daniel Lebhardt reached deep inside music whose first movement is full of nervous energy, abrupt changes of dynamics and tempo and sudden lurches between the turbulent and the ethereal.  The second movement came as a complete contrast, Daniel capturing its eloquent simplicity and infinite tenderness.  The finale is different again: whereas the sonata’s opening is dominated by stops and starts, its ending is inexorable.  He played it as if Beethoven had in mind a relentless galloping ride over rough ground…until it all dissolved in a mood of quiet resignation.

It can’t be easy to decide what to play next after such an epic start.  Schumann’s Gesänge der Frühe (Songs of Dawn) were an imaginative and unusual choice, coming as they do from the end of Schumann’s career, at a time when he was struggling with his mental health. There are five pieces, all with distinctive characters, all captured vividly in Daniel’s performance.  The first is like a chorale, almost religious in tone yet permeated with aching dissonances.  After the strangely enigmatic second piece the third is the most virtuosic with a galloping, relentless rhythmic energy that felt, in Daniel’s performance, less like joy and more like a manic attempt to escape.  He conveyed the restless song that is the fourth piece vividly, with all its agitation, yearning and beauty – and he completed the cycle with the chorale atmosphere of the fifth piece and final bars which leave the listener suspended in a sort of half-light.

Finally came Brahms’s Piano Pieces, Op. 119, another set which comes from the end of its composer’s career.  Here emotion is contained rather than worn on the sleeve and the listener feels that Brahms is still pushing at the limits of his art. The pieces are complex but Daniel Lebhardt has the musical intellect needed to illuminate them.  His playing gleamed with a rich understanding not only of the pieces individually but of the set as a whole.  Nowhere was this more in evidence than the second piece with its cross-rhythms and throwaway ending.  After such a recital an encore seemed inevitable – and Daniel’s choice of another piece of late Brahms was exactly right.

Daniel Lebhardt playing in the Sunday Piano Series at Nottingham’s Royal Concert Hall.