Shop Now

Gramophone

Panayiotis Demopoulos is a young Greek composer-pianist who shows himself in this sharply contrasted recital to be an exceptionally sensitive artist. In Brahms’s Intermezzi he responds with a special interior magic to the composer’s most bittersweet world. He is alive to every harmonic felicity in No 1 and to the troubled undertow of No 2. The central più moto of No 3 may be too constrained to convey a sufficiently blessed relief from the surrounding darkness (Brahms called it ‘a cradle song for all his grief’) but he is hauntingly poetic in the close so that like Wordsworth’s The Solitary Reaper one bears the music in one’s ear ‘long after it was heard no more’.

Demopoulos’s Farewells show how music of severe economy can achieve a concentrated evocation, and if his performance of the Mussorgsky Pictures is spotted with errors and uncertainties it is never less than musicianly. The catalogue bursts at the seams with outsize and awe-inspiring discs of the Mussorgsky and so I look forward to hearing the perceptive Demopoulos in repertoire sufficiently subtle to suit his talents. He is well recorded and has written some excellent accompanying notes.

[review of original release on Dunelm label]