World-Class Pianist Brings ‘Introspections’ to Lucas Parklands

Lucas Parklands welcomed back one of its most acclaimed visiting artists on Sunday afternoon (19th April), as Italian pianist Ida Pelliccioli returned for her second consecutive year to perform a solo recital before a full and attentive audience on the Blackall Range. The programme, titled Introspections, brought together five composers, Jean Sibelius, Gabriel Fauré, Ferruccio Busoni, Leoš Janáček and Maurice Ravel, whose works cluster in the decades around the turn of the 20th century, their five distinct voices bound by a single unifying idea: music that creates emotional impact not through grand, showy gestures but through precision and restraint. “I wanted to present pieces that reveal,” Ida explained ahead of the concert, “a very personal and intimate side” of the composers who wrote them. Over the course of the afternoon, she made a compelling case that such music can be every bit as powerful as the most dramatic repertoire on the concert stage.

A Third Visit to the Range

Ida acknowledged one of the advantages of performing at Lucas Parklands, not always available to touring pianists, who often face the challenge of connecting with an unfamiliar instrument the moment they walk on stage. The preparation showed: from the moments her first notes of the Sibelius, her playing had the settled, unhurried quality of a musician entirely at home with the instrument in front of her.

Ida builds her programmes chronologically, and ‘Introspections’ followed that structure. But the sequence was also shaped by a carefully considered emotional arc. “The beauty of this universal music,” she said, “is that anyone can make it their own”, and the journey was designed so that “the listener’s experience is a progression.” This was not music that demanded specialist knowledge. It asked only that you listen.

Opening With Finland: Sibelius’s Six Impromptus

The afternoon began with a set of six short pieces by Jean Sibelius, the Finnish composer best known for his sweeping orchestral works but who, in these early piano pieces from the 1890s, revealed a more intimate and folk-inflected side of his personality.

The Impromptus of Op. 5 were written in the early 1890s, a period when Sibelius was deeply immersed in Finnish folk music and the traditions of Karelia. The pieces are imbued with rhythmic and melodic echoes of folk dance. He could himself play the kantele, a Finnish plucked string instrument not unlike a zither that is invoked in the 5th Impromptu. Ida brought out that folk-inflected quality beautifully across each of them, keeping the playing transparent and dancing, the higher notes ringing with a simplicity that never tipped into heavy-handed Romanticism.  The First Impromptu in G minor opened with deep, slowly rolled chords in the left hand and a sustained note in the right, dark and almost choral in nature, like a ritual invocation, before the melody rose from the depths of the harmony in a more song-like Cantabile section. A slowing and thickening of texture toward the close gave a sense of suspension before the final G minor cadence arrived: solemn and quietly resolute. The Second moved from a gentle nocturne-like Lento into a sudden Vivace, the melody breaking free and seeming to run, the right hand chasing something urgent while the left sustained the harmonic momentum. The Third, marked alla marcia, built its march character on a left-hand figure beneath a lyrical, dance-like theme, which gave way to a softer middle section before swelling to a broad, resonant climax and subsiding into restraint.  The Fourth Impromptu was the quietest and most inward of the set, a sighing Andantino with an almost improvisatory quality, building gradually before a defiant forte chord that felt less like drama than a quiet inner declaration. The Fifth was the most overtly brilliant where Sibeilus makes direct reference to the Kantele: glittering sextuplet arpeggios racing across the entire keyboard in a shimmering river of sound, a simple melody floating above it. Ida held the final note until it faded entirely to silence, a beautifully judged gesture that left the piece suspended. The Sixth and final Impromptu, in a gently rocking 6/4, brought the set to a close with the quality of a lullaby or serenade: nostalgic, bittersweet, and ending pianississimo, melody and harmony dissolving into the air of the concert hall, leaving the room hushed and still.

Opening with this set of six pieces was a deliberate choice. “Starting with a longer composition allows the audience to concentrate and to fully immerse themselves in the recital,” Ida explained, and by the time the last Impromptu had faded, the room had settled into a quality of listening that the rest of the programme would reward.

The Art of Saying Less: Fauré’s Short Pieces

Gabriel Fauré, a French composer who served for many years as director of the Paris Conservatoire, was a master of achieving great emotional depth with the simplest possible means. The two pieces Ida selected from his set of Eight Short Pieces, Op. 84, illustrated this gift perfectly.

The Capriccio opened in dolce mood, light, almost waltz-like in its 9/8 lilt, the right hand carrying the melody while the left provided a gently moving accompaniment that supported rather than intruded. As the piece built toward its close, the music became more animated and rhythmic before arriving at three firm, pedalled chords: a bright E major resolution that gave the Capriccio a quality of polite, sunny closure, like a courtly dance coming neatly to rest. The Improvisation that followed was a complete contrast, hesitant, half-whispered, opening almost like a monologue spoken quietly to oneself. Fauré marks it with careful expressive directions throughout: piano, dolce, sostenuto. The pedalling creates a soft, veiled atmosphere without any blurring of the harmony, and the piece ends not with a gesture but with three quietly sustained chords in C major, fading to nothing, a moment of gentle acceptance, perfectly in keeping with the afternoon’s introspective spirit.

Both pieces were written specifically for the sight-reading examination of the Paris Conservatoire – works designed to be played at first glance, revealing instinct rather than rehearsed technique. In Ida’s hands, they sounded anything but sight-read: they were polished and shaped with evident care, yet retained the quality of spontaneous expression that Fauré intended.

Fauré, like all the composers on this programme, believed in suggestion over declaration, in letting the music hint at feeling rather than announcing it. It is an approach that Ida shares. “I am deeply connected to all the pieces I choose to perform,” she said. “I relate to music that doesn’t necessarily need virtuoso gestures to express the deepest feelings.”

A Son’s Farewell: Busoni’s Fantasia after Bach

The emotional heart of the afternoon was provided by a work that many in the audience may not have encountered before: Ferruccio Busoni’s Fantasia after J.S. Bach, composed in 1909 in memory of his recently deceased father. Busoni described works of this kind as Nachdichtung, a German term for a free re-imagining of pre-existing material so independent tha tthe result becomes an original piece in its own right. It is a piece of deep gravity and spiritual searching, part Bach, part Busoni meditation, part requiem, and it felt, in Ida’s hands, less like a showpiece than a vast inward journey.

The piece is also, as Pelliccioli noted, highly sequenced in its construction, a succession of distinct sections, each with its own character, which makes it particuarly demanding to hold together. “You have to manage a lot of transitions” she observed, “without losing the whole architecture of the piece.” On Sunday afternoon, that architecture held from the first not to the last.

Busoni was an Italian-German composer and pianist who spent much of his career championing the music of Bach, and it was his father who had first introduced him to it. Busoni’s Fantasia nach J.S. Bach draws on multiple Bach sources, including chorale themes and organ‑style textures, reworking them into a single, highly personal fantasy rather than a literal transcription of three specific organ works – at once a memorial, a tribute, and a son’s act of gratitude. The score ends with the Latin inscription PAX EJ!, meaning “Peace to him.”  The work opens quietly, marked, in the score, Molto tranquillo e gravemente, with an arpeggiated figure rising chromatically over a dark bass, wide octave spans in the left hand answered slowly by the right: mysterious, grave, with a sense of death hovering close. The music is built as a dialogue throughout, bass answering treble, left hand answering right, until a sweeter, more lyrical passage offers a moment of lightness before the argument resumes in earnest.  The Parlando section, almost fugue-like, is where Bach comes most clearly into focus: the right hand singing while the left supplies a running commentary beneath it. A more open Allegretto section follows, still deeply respectful of Bach, with a strong sense of the organ in the bass and a fast Bachian melody high above it. Later, a broad Andante spreads the material across the full range of the keyboard to create something cathedral-like in its sonority, deep bass notes, sustained chords, waves of sound gathering and receding, before the music becomes progressively more distant and soft.  The final section returns to a gentler, more contemplative tone. The closing marking in the score is marked Riconciliato, reconciled, and it describes the music exactly: a tranquil resolution, the statement of PAX EJ!, and then a slow dwindling into silence.

Ida described the Parlando section, that almost fugue-like dialogue for two voices, as the piece’s emotional core. Busoni marks it with the word parlando, Italian for “talking to”: “we understand that he intended to recreate a dialogue between the son and his deceased father, a last, pacified, farewell.” Hearing it in performance, knowing what lay behind it, was one of the afternoon’s most affecting moments. She did not underline or dramatise it. She simply played it, and let the music speak.

The Busoni also presented the most demanding technical challenges of the afternoon. Because Busoni was writing for the piano in the manner of a pipe organ, which can sustain multiple independent lines simultaneously, the writing frequently calls for three separate melodic strands at once rather than the usual two, one for each hand. “This creates larger intervals to play, bigger jumps, fuller chords,” Ida noted. None of that difficulty was audible on Sunday; the playing had the spacious, resonant quality of music heard in a large stone church.

Janáček’s In the Mists

The Czech composer Leoš Janáček wrote his four-movement piano cycle In the Mists in the winter of 1912-13, and it carries all the uncertainty that title suggests. The harmonies never quite settle; the phrases are short, halting, and reluctant to resolve. It is music that feels perpetually on the verge of something it never quite reaches, and in that quality lies its strange, compelling power.

Ida describes her approach to any unfamiliar score as beginning with careful study: understanding the circumstances in which it was written, then analysing the music itself, and finally working out “the quality and type of sound that we want to convey through our interpretation.” In the Janáček, the sound required is veiled and cloudy, and achieving it without letting the piano become muddy requires specific technical tools. “There are a few techniques I use,” she said, “like half-pedalling or using the middle pedal in Janáček”, the middle pedal on a concert grand can sustain selected bass notes while leaving the upper strings free to speak clearly.

The result in her performance was exactly right: veiled and half-lost, yet still articulate, the mist never collapsing into mere blur. The four movements each carved out their own distinct character within that shared atmosphere. The first, Andante, opened with a cantando melody over a dolcissimo bass, the pedal heavily marked in the score from the outset, signalling that haze and resonance would be central throughout. The music slowly accelerated and grew louder before a lighter, slightly mournful theme emerged, increasingly excited, with rushing descending arpeggios, before the opening melody returned more quietly, like a ghost memory of the turbulence that had just passed, and the movement closed on a soft, inward-looking pulse.

The second movement, Molto adagio, began with its main theme stated clearly but ornamented with great delicacy, as if each note were being weighed. A Presto section followed, delicate at first, then shifting into a Grave passage where the hands seemed almost disconnected, answering each other in short, abrupt phrases, before a more agitated section gave way to a gentle, meno mosso resolution. The third, Andantino, kept the listener subtly off-balance throughout, Janáček’s constant harmonic shifts making the music feel as though it were drifting in and out of focus, closing at last in a ppp, ritenuto whisper, fragile and barely held together. The fourth and final movement, Presto, brought a forceful and surprising conclusion, not the quiet dissolution one might have expected, but something more conflicted and driven. The tempo kept shifting, restless and accelerating, then pulling back, eventually giving way to a more flowing passage with sudden sparkling right-hand chords, shafts of light through fog, before precipitando descending runs turned almost angry. The final statement was emphatic: all the earlier fragmentation gathered into one definitive close. Placed before the Ravel, In the Mists gave the programme its most searching chapter, and that finale’s refusal to simply fade felt true to the whole afternoon’s spirit. Introspection, Ida seemed to be saying, does not always end in quiet acceptance.

Five Composers, One Idea

Looking back across the full programme, the coherence of Ida’s thinking was clear. Sibelius opened with folk-inflected simplicity rooted in landscape and national identity. Fauré distilled that simplicity into something more compressed and emotionally subtle. Busoni brought grief into the open, the most nakedly personal music of the concert. And Janáček left the listener suspended in ambiguity, in a world where resolution is neither promised nor delivered. All four composers were working at roughly the same moment in history, each finding their own path through a musical world in rapid change, each a composer of the interior. “To be true to yourself, to the composer, to the moment of the performance,” Ida said, “this is what matters and what will resonate.”

Ravel to Close: Three Menuets

A slow crescendo and broadening pedal drew breath before the final section, marked Ralentir beaucoup and then Très lent, the last notes fading out completely, not allowed to ring or shimmer: a hushed, almost ceremonial close.  The Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn is built on a musical puzzle: Ravel spells out the name using the German solfège system: H = B natural, A = A, D = D, (D = Y) and N = G, forming the motif H–A–D–D–G, which recurs and even appears in inversion throughout the piece. That motif recurs throughout the piece in different voices, registers, and even in reverse, Haydn’s name circling back like a recurring thought, a signature glimpsed then gone. The writing is compact yet dense, at times stretching across three staves as though the piano is conducting a quiet chamber conversation with itself. The piece ends with Haydn’s name played one last time under a rallentando, a slow, respectful signature, stepping back into history.

The Menuet antique, the earliest of the three, and one of Ravel’s first published works, rounded off the set with archaic charm and a harmonic palette that surprised at every turn, as if an eighteenth-century dance had been gently refracted through an early Impressionist lens. The choice was characteristic in its precision. “We end the programme with a definition of introspection understood as ‘essence,’” Ida explained. “Ravel captured the quintessence of a baroque idiom, here the menuet, and transformed it, in his own language.” Where the main programme had explored introspection as emotional depth, grief, memory, uncertainty, the Ravel pieces offered it as distillation: a whole tradition reduced to its most refined, characteristic gesture.

All three were played with Ravel’s trademark clarity and quiet elegance. As the formal programme drew to a close, the audience had been taken from Finnish folk memory through French restraint, through grief and mist, and deposited here: in the cool, precise light of Ravel’s distilled miniatures.

The audience’s sustained applause brought Pelliccioli back to the keyboard for two encores: two sonatas by the eighteenth-century Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti, one bright and bouncing in D major, one darker and more urgent in G minor. After an afternoon spent in the introspective world of the main programme, it was a generous and perfectly judged gift: a brief, dazzling turn back into pure keyboard joy, and a warm send-off into the autumn afternoon.

A Growing Relationship With the Range

The warmth of Sunday’s reception suggested Ida Pelliccioli has already built a loyal following on the Blackall Range. For those who attended: it was a privilege. For those who missed it, watch for her name. On the evidence of Sunday afternoon, she will be back.

Ida Pelliccioli continues her Australian tour with performances in Canberra, Melbourne and Adelaide, where one of her concerts will launch her ‘Oenological concerts’ project.

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