The Piano Alone

Thomas Kelly comes to St James’s Piccadilly with a programme in which the piano stands in for everything else — a ballroom, a singer, a score written for seven hands’ worth of players.

There is a quieter thread running through it. In 1820 a young musician named Julius Benedict went to Weimar to learn composition from Hummel. The following year he moved to Dresden to study with Weber. Two years after that, Weber took him to Vienna and introduced him to Beethoven. Benedict’s Rêverie sits in the middle of the first half, and the three composers who made him stand all around it.

Weber’s Invitation to the Dance arrives by way of Carl Tausig, whose transcription turns a waltz into something far larger. Beethoven’s Andante began as the slow movement of a sonata, was taken out, and published on its own — so admired that it acquired the nickname it still carries. Hummel compressed his own most celebrated score into ten fingers. And Mendelssohn’s songs, famously, have no singer.

Thomas Kelly is the Benjamin Britten Fellow at the Royal College of Music, the highest award the College gives a pianist, and took the Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother Rose Bowl on graduating in 2024. He was a prizewinner at the 2021 Leeds International Piano Competition and took second prize at the Liszt Utrecht Competition in January.

Programme

Weber — Invitation to the Dance, Op. 65 (tr. Tausig)
Julius Benedict — Rêverie, Op. 39
Mendelssohn — Songs without Words

Interval

Beethoven — Andante favori, WoO 57
Hummel — Septet, Op. 74, in the composer’s own arrangement for solo piano

Completed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1684, St James’s Piccadilly is among London’s most intimate and acoustically distinguished spaces.

Founded in 1921 as Britain’s first professional chamber orchestra and honoured by the patronage of HM The Queen, the London Chamber Orchestra has shaped chamber music in the UK for over a century.

Smart evening attire.