City of London Festival: Barry Douglas (piano)

Janáček - Selections from On an Overgrown Path
Brahms - Sonata No 3 Op 5
Schubert - Sonata D960

Northern Irish pianist Barry Douglas offers a programme featuring two of the towering masterworks for piano. Beginning in gentler musical territory, connecting with the Festival’s ongoing environmental themes, Janáček’s nostalgic On an Overgrown Path focuses on the countryside of the composers’ homeland and represents the passage of time, the deaths of his two children and his artistic isolation. As a contrast Brahms’ early Sonata follows a large-scale five movement structure which announced his arrival as a creative giant of the Romantic era. Schubert’s Sonata in B flat, his last before his death, explores immensity of a different kind – vast and lyrical, this work traverses a range of moods from desolation to hope and ends with whimsical optimism.