Alice Sara Ott review: Adventures in Wonderland

Alice Sara Ott called the first half of her solo programme Wonderland. This was nothing to do with her first name, the German-Japanese pianist informed us, rather a reflection of the world of enchantment inhabited by Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, of which she offered a generous selection.

These pieces are familiar student fare, but it’s good to hear them realised by a high-calibre executant, especially one with such a fertile poetic imagination.

The fairies, the spring awakening, the wedding bells — all were dispatched with delicacy and tenderness. There were trolls too, of the Norwegian variety, but it was Grieg’s G minor Ballade — song expanding into impassioned rhetoric, à la Chopin — that formed a bridge to Liszt’s monumental B minor Sonata.

This, for Ott, is the “netherworld”. Dressed in yellow for the sunlit first half, she duly appeared for the second in black and the entire hall, including the stage, was plunged into darkness.

There certainly is a whiff of sulphur about the work. Not for nothing was Liszt described by a contemporary as “Mephistopheles disguised as an abbé”.

The demonic is perhaps not Ott’s strongest suit: there needs to be more ferocity in the articulation. But her impressive sense of structure enabled her to sculpt richly imagined ideas into a magnificently cohesive and powerful whole.