on 5 September 2026

Photographs by David Hogg of Horizon Imaging.

Benjamin Grosvenor's recital at Breinton of Mozart, Beethoven, Scriabin and Chopin reminded everyone why he is such a special, celebrated recitalist, in constant demand on the world's most prestigious stages. Having shot to national prominence in 2004 when he won the Keyboard Final of the BBC Young Musician Competition at just 11 years old, he has since evolved from a gifted prodigy into a mature, globally sought-after virtuoso. Many of his traits are unchanged – his total engagement with the instrument, a focus that seems impossible to interrupt, and an uncompromising approach to interpretation. Benjamin's stage presence is not one of theatrical showmanship; it is a quiet commitment, funnelling all his energy directly into the keys to pursue his interpretation of the composer's voice.

With Mozart's delightful Piano Sonata No. 13, Benjamin's shaping of tone and phrase shone with lovely clarity and singing quality. The final movement's unusual cadenza showcased rapid, tremendous passagework.

The moment Benjamin started Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, an extreme shift of mood took place – it was like switching from bird-chirping lightness to a wordless, spellbound stillness. Breathtakingly beautiful. The second movement is short, and usually it feels over almost as soon as it begins. However, I particularly loved this one: the beautiful phrasing of the joyful, dance-like melodies swirled and flowed flawlessly, while every single note was heard crystal clear.

Scriabin's Piano Sonata No. 2 is a compact piece in just two movements, but it felt so impactful. Benjamin's keyboard work conjured endless sparkling sounds and tonal colours, leaving us feeling almost as if we were surrounded by symphonic acoustics.

The hushed, tense opening of Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 2 reset our minds, readying us for tonight's concert finale. For the next 25 minutes or so, no one stirred or shifted; we were glued to what was unfolding, experiencing a storm, anxious energy, deep force, angelic singing, spiritual enlightenment… Benjamin's playing was sincere and honest, without any embellishment. He is gifted with an incredible singing touch, which produces an amazing lyrical tone and, at the same time, a vast range of tonal colours. Shifting from muscular drama to the most delicate singing seemed an easy feat for him.

We were overjoyed when an amazing selection of encore pieces followed: Moszkowski's Étude No. 11, Richard Strauss' Morgen (arranged for piano), and Beethoven's 7 Variations on God Save the King. A truly incredible evening.

• Mozart
  • Piano Sonata No. 13, K333
• Beethoven
  • Moonlight Sonata No. 14, Op. 27 No. 2
• Scriabin
  • Sonata No. 2
• Chopin
  • Piano Sonata No. 2 "Funeral March"

Encores:

• Moskowski
  • Etude No. 11
• Strauss
  • Morgen
• Beethoven
  • 7 Variations on God Save the King

Acclaimed and multi-award winning British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor is renowned for his 'indisputable virtuosity' and understated elegance at the keyboard and appears on the world's most prestigious stages. During his 2025/26 season, Benjamin debuts with the Swedish Radio (Beethoven 1), performs Ravel’s G major Concerto with Filharmonica della Scala, San Diego Symphony, CBSO and Orchestre Svizzera Italiana.

He closes the Philharmonia Orchestra’s 80th anniversary season with a UK tour of Strauss’s Burleske within the Southbank Centre's 75th anniversary celebrations, before touring Beethoven's Piano Concerto no.1 with the Aurora Orchestra conducted by Nicholas Collon, including at the Cheltenham Festival. He also returns to the Concertgebouw Amsterdam for his debut performance with John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London.

Recital highlights this season include Carnegie Hall, Chicago, Amsterdam, Singapore and London. He makes his debut at Berlin’s Boulez Saal with Kian Soltani and at Vienna’s Muzikverein and Heidelberger Frühling with his Piano Quartet featuring Hyeyoon Park, Timothy Ridout and Kian Soltani.

Previous concerto engagements have included Cleveland, Boston Symphony, NHK Symphony, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Orchestre National de France. Benjamin performs with all the major UK orchestras and regularly appears at the BBC Proms, most recently with Ravel G major (2025) and Busoni (2024), and has also performed a solo recital and at the First and Last Nights.

Benjamin’s recent conductor collaborations include Marin Alsop, Elim Chan, Edward Gardner, Manfred Honneck, Paavo Jarvi, Nathalie Stutzmann, Krzysztof Urbanski and Kazuki Yamada.

A celebrated recitalist, recent engagements have included Berliner Konzerthaus, Wigmore Hall, Southbank Centre, Luxembourg Philharmonie, Lucerne and at Klavierfest Ruhr, Mantaa and La Roque d’Anthéron Festivals. He was a featured artist at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris and in 2024 premiered Hommage à Liszt by Brett Dean - which was commissioned for him - in Lucerne, Chicago and London.

Benjamin's impressive discography on Decca Classics stretches back to 2011, with his most recent release of solo repertoire by Chopin described by International Piano Magazine Critic’s Choice as an 'Altogether revelatory experience'.

Mozart: Piano Sonata No. 13

Composed at the end of a demanding year, most likely during a stopover in Linz on the way home from Salzburg, the sonata belongs to a set of three published together, poised and untroubled on its surface. That journey had in fact brought Mozart and his new wife Constanze face to face with his still-disapproving father, and, while they were there, the death of their infant son — none of which the music betrays. The opening Allegro has an almost operatic fluency, its themes handed between hands with the ease of conversation. Mozart had spent much of the preceding two years steeping himself in the galant style of Johann Christian Bach, whose death in 1782 had genuinely shaken him — “What a loss to the musical world!”, he wrote to his own father at the time. The admiration went back to childhood: as an eight-year-old prodigy visiting London, Mozart had sat on Bach’s knee while the two took turns improvising at the keyboard, trading a bar at a time so seamlessly that his sister recalled “you would swear that just one person was playing.” Something of that closeness carries through this sonata too — its opening idea echoes, almost note for note, the start of one of Bach’s own — and something of the same admired elegance runs through the movement’s many small surprises of harmony and phrasing. That admiration was never mere imitation, though — nowhere in the sonata does Mozart simply copy Bach’s manner. What survives is a shared instinct for how a phrase should breathe, dressed in Mozart’s own, already unmistakable voice.

The slow movement is songlike in the most literal sense: a long, unhurried melody that asks the pianist to sing rather than simply play. The finale that follows is unusually spacious for a solo sonata, almost concerto-like in scale, with a brief burst of virtuosity written into the music rather than left to the player’s imagination. It keeps circling back to a genial, easily hummed tune, wandering off into brighter and stormier episodes before returning to it each time — the shape that gives a rondo its charm, familiar and freshly surprising by turns, and a satisfying way to round off a piece that has spent much of its time in more intimate, conversational company. Heard on its own terms, the sonata is chamber music of the most sociable kind. Heard at the start of this evening, it also does useful work: it sets a mood of clarity and ease against which the rest of the programme will, in various ways, push.

Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 14

The subtitle on its title page, Quasi una fantasia, is Beethoven’s own instruction that the usual sonata shape should not be assumed. The sonata was published alongside a sibling from the same year, also marked quasi una fantasia and dedicated to a different aristocratic pupil; both play their movements without pause. The nickname “Moonlight” came later, coined in the 1830s by the German poet and critic Ludwig Rellstab, who likened its opening to a boat drifting across Lake Lucerne by moonlight; Beethoven never used it himself. He composed the sonata in 1801, at a time when he had fallen for his young pupil Countess Giulietta Guicciardi, to whom the piece is dedicated. He proposed to her; her father dismissed him bluntly, as a suitor with “neither rank, fortune, nor permanent position” to offer a countess. Within two years she married a count of her own class instead, in a match that made her unhappy. It was around this same year that Beethoven first confided to a couple of close friends, swearing them to secrecy, that his hearing was starting to fail — a fact that lends a sonata built so heavily on hushed half-tones and quiet murmuring an extra edge of poignancy, whether or not Beethoven intended it that way. He gave the work its own first performances himself and was reportedly baffled by how quickly it became his most popular sonata. “Surely I have written better things,” he is said to have remarked — a judgement history has firmly overruled. He was, by this point, not long past the premiere of his First Symphony, and already thinking in far larger terms than a single pianist alone in a room; a compact, intimate piano sonata was, in his own reckoning, a much smaller achievement than the public came to believe.

The famous opening movement sets aside anything like a conventional tune. Instead there is a slow, quiet murmur that never lets up, hovering under a spare, almost whispered melody — atmosphere first, story later. The short movement that follows is lighter and more dance-like, over almost as soon as it starts; Franz Liszt is said to have called it “a flower between two chasms.” There is no pause before it gives way to what comes next: the two final movements run straight into one another, so the change in mood lands without warning. The finale is where the real weight of the piece lies: fast, driven and increasingly urgent, it was, in its day, some of the most difficult music Beethoven had yet written for the instrument — and a world away from the composure of Mozart’s sonata heard earlier this evening.

Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 2

Known as the Sonata-Fantasy, it had an unusually long gestation. He began sketching it in 1892, not long after finishing his studies, and did not consider it finished until 1897 — five years, and several drafts he was openly dissatisfied with, later. He performed it himself in Paris more than once along the way, still unsatisfied even as audiences heard it. Its completion, that same year, coincided with another change in his life: 1897 was also the year he married the pianist Vera Isacova. Its origin, though, reached back further still, to a specific memory: Scriabin’s first sight of the sea, on a trip to the Baltic coast in his early twenties. He later described the two movements himself, calling the first “the calm of a night by the seashore in the South,” its development a “dark agitation of the depths,” before a passage of unexpected tenderness he described as “the moonlight which comes after the darkness of the night.”

The second movement answers that stillness with sudden motion, a rush of restless, wave-like energy that never quite settles — closer to the sea’s turbulence than to its calm, and never returning to the moonlit reassurance of what came before. Compact in just two movements, this is early Scriabin: the second of ten sonatas he would eventually write, the first composed when he was only twenty-one. Its sound still owes a real debt to Chopin, well before the composer’s later fascination with mysticism carried his music into stranger, more otherworldly territory — within two decades he was planning a vast, multi-sensory work involving scent, light and dance that he genuinely believed might bring about the end of the world. Tonight’s sonata predates all of that: an early sighting of a very unusual mind, still working largely within tradition. Heard just before the Chopin, its own moonlit episode makes a quiet, unplanned echo of the Beethoven heard earlier in the evening.

Chopin: Piano Sonata No. 2

The middle of Chopin’s three published sonatas, and by far the best known of them, it owes its fame to a single movement written years before the rest of the piece existed. The Marche funèbre was composed in 1837, a stand-alone piece Chopin set aside; only in the summer of 1839, staying at the country house of the novelist George Sand, his companion of several years, at Nohant in central France, did he write the three remaining movements around it.

The result unsettled its first listeners. Robert Schumann, reviewing the newly published score, complained that Chopin had “simply bound together four of his most unruly children” — though he admitted that even the strangest of the four, the finale, breathed “a special and dreadful spirit.” Despite that puzzled first reaction, the sonata went on to become one of the most performed of all Chopin’s large-scale works.

The sonata opens in a state of real unease — a hushed, tense opening that almost at once gives way to something stormier, its anxious energy interrupted every so often by a warmer, more song-like idea. A fierce, driving movement follows, its intensity easing briefly at the centre into something gentler before the opening mood reasserts itself. Then comes the funeral march itself: a slow, tolling tread beneath a plain, unadorned melody, opening out briefly into a warmer episode before the tread returns. The finale lasts barely a minute and a half — a hushed rush of notes with no melody to hold onto, often likened, in Anton Rubinstein’s phrase, to “wind blowing over the graves.” Asked once what he had meant by it, Chopin is said to have replied only that it was “gossiping between two hands.” It puzzled specialists for decades afterwards; one, writing well over a century later, concluded it made more sense as music of the twentieth century than the nineteenth Chopin actually wrote it in — an oddity he had arrived at some ninety years early.

The funeral march, in particular, has travelled far beyond the concert hall. It did not stay confined even in Chopin’s own lifetime: an orchestrated version was played, for the first time at any actual funeral, at Chopin’s own, at the Église de la Madeleine in Paris in October 1849. In the century and a half since, its opening tread has been hummed, whistled and quoted so often, in so many contexts that have nothing to do with Chopin at all, that a great many people who have never knowingly heard a note of his other music would still recognise it in an instant. Whatever the finale means, it brings a sonata that began in Classical poise, travelled through Beethoven’s turmoil and Scriabin’s sea, to the strangest possible close.