Flash Bax wins no prizes for subtlety

Alessio Bax | Queen Elizabeth Hall, London/BBC Radio 3

Just over three weeks ago the 23-year-old Italian pianist Alessio Bax became the Gold Medal Winner at the Leeds International Piano Competition. His prize included a long list of prestigious engagements, including a QEH recital on Wednesday, opening another Harrods International Piano Series on the South Bank. The piano was donated by Yamaha to celebrate the company's centenary, and three more gleaming models stood in the foyer for anyone bold enough to try them out.

Just over three weeks ago the 23-year-old Italian pianist Alessio Bax became the Gold Medal Winner at the Leeds International Piano Competition. His prize included a long list of prestigious engagements, including a QEH recital on Wednesday, opening another Harrods International Piano Series on the South Bank. The piano was donated by Yamaha to celebrate the company's centenary, and three more gleaming models stood in the foyer for anyone bold enough to try them out.

Bax's programme revealed a great deal, both about piano and pianist, for the same instrument can sound very different according to who is playing it. He chose mostly late Romantic music, calling for athletic strength and agility, but began with Schubert's A minor Sonata, D784, written the year after his Unfinished Symphony, which gives a clue to the sonata's breadth and ambitious range of expression. The first movement, in particular, demands a very strong nerve and total commitment throughout passages which are austere and spare, but strongly purposeful. Playing this music is an act of faith, and despite its stormy explosions and its shafts of sunlight, it also requires self-denial, for Schubert did not pander to pianistic vanity - he certainly wasn't competing with the virtuoso crowd-pleasers of his day.

Bax did not have this stoic quality, and varied his pulse too much to sustain a sense of line, hurrying when there were few notes and slowing down when they became uncomfortably numerous, for he had set too fast a tempo at the outset. The shorter second and third movements were better unified but still expressively slight.

The other big work before the interval was Rachmaninov's "Variations on a theme of Corelli." Rachmaninov himself sometimes used to cut some variations if he heard the audience coughing and fidgeting, but then a composer is allowed to feel unduly modest, and Rachmaninov almost invariably thought he had made his bigger works too long. Bax made some very nice sounds and was certainly up to the heaviest demands, and he did hold the attention, at least of this audience. But he exaggerated the brittle fragmentation of the variations leading up to the Intermezzo just over halfway, and there wasn't a feeling that something bigger was accumulating, which then justifies the relaxation of the dreamy recall of the theme at the end.

Four of Rachmaninov's Opus 23 Preludes were stylish, if a bit lightweight in feeling - it would have been interesting to hear Bax play them on a Steinway, which would have made them heavier and more powerful. Still, his way with the E flat and G flat Preludes was so rhythmically free as to seem casual, a characteristic which made Granados's "El amor y la muerte" even more rambling than usual.

He ended with what is obviously one of his party pieces - Ravel's own solo piano version of his choreographic poem, "La Valse". Looking at the live keyboard relay on the screen above the piano supplemented the music very nicely, with its great leaps, cluster-like chords and glissandi. Diaghilev said it wasn't a ballet, but a portrait of a ballet. Obscured, I would add, by the aural equivalent of too much dry ice.