Hanni Liang (piano) Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham17 March 2024.

3✩✩✩ Review: William Ruff.

“Hanni Liang: fine piano-playing - but controversial presentation.”

There are two stories to tell about Hannu Liang’s recital in Nottingham’s Sunday Morning Piano Series: one about performing, the other about presenting. Let’s start with Hanni the musician and her thought-provoking and unusual programme.

She is a highly gifted pianist, able to coax lovely sounds from the instrument across a wide range of tonal colours. She started with some of Brahms’ final thoughts after a long career of writing for the instrument. His Six Pieces, Op 118 are a set of delectable miniatures consisting of short intermezzos plus a ballade and romance. They are intensely personal pieces which don’t give up their secrets easily. Even at the end of his life Brahms was experimenting and the effect of his writing is often tantalisingly ambiguous. Hanni’s playing certainly brought out the serenity of Brahms’ vision, whilst at the same time hinting at the turbulence which lurks beneath their surface.

She followed Brahms with Debussy’s Images Book I, three pieces which seem to blur the boundary of sound and sight. The first produces vivid impressions of unsettled water, as if pebbles are being thrown into it by an unseen hand. The final ‘image’ was handled with extreme delicacy, Hanni’s fingers capturing the ‘fantastical but precise lightness’ which the composer calls for in his score.

The real discovery of Hanni’s recital was the Sonata No 2 by Dame Ethel Smyth, not only a composer of note but also a leading member of the English suffragette movement. She has a distinctive musical voice, although clearly much influenced by her contemporaries. There is a kind of dark Brahmsian energy which runs throughout the piece, although there is no doubt that the emotion which shines through – and the gestures Smyth uses – are hers and hers alone. It is no surprise that her art appeals so strongly to a musician of Hanni Liang’s temperament.

However, there’s another story to tell – and that involved a clash between musician and format. The rules of the Sunday Morning Series are simple: an hour of music including a brief chat to the audience. Hanni went much further, however, adding 20 minutes to the running time by a dramatic reading from Ethel Smyth’s Memoirs: a text as uncompromising about the treatment of women at the hands of men as you would expect from a suffragette imprisoned for her beliefs and rock-throwing exploits.

Hanni Liang undoubtedly has a big musical personality – but the music would have spoken rather more clearly for itself.

Hanni Liang performing in the Sunday Morning Piano Series at Nottingham’s Royal Concert Hall