Barry Douglas, solo piano

BRAHMS Three Intermezzi, op.117
SCHUBERT Piano Sonata no.21 in B flat major, D960
MUSSORGSKY Pictures at an Exhibition

The renowned pianist Barry Douglas won the Gold Medal at the 1986 Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition in Moscow and has gone on to develop a major international career. He joins us here in St Albans a few days before his latest performances at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland.

Schubert’s D960 Sonata was his very final instrumental composition, written just a few months before he died at the age of only thirty-one. This monumental work is acclaimed by many as his greatest masterpiece in the form, and delves deeply into fundamental, universal questions of life and mortality.

After the interval Barry Douglas’s virtuosity takes us a vividly imagined promenade around St Petersburg’s Imperial Academy of Arts in 1874. Modest Mussorgsky’s pride for his Russian homeland permeates Pictures at an Exhibition, his emotional tribute to his artist friend Viktor Hartmann.

For more information visit https://www.internationalorganfestival.co.uk/evening-concerts/barry-douglas-solo-piano