Music / Giulio Biddau in Concert. At Gandel Hall, National Gallery of Australia, August 18. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

Piano aficionados were treated to a rare, intense evening of piano playing by Sardinian-born pianist Giulio Biddau in Gandel Hall at the National Gallery on Sunday evening.

Hosted by Canberra International Music Festival, the European Union Delegation to Australia and the Italian Embassy, the concert was styled as a celebration of European-Australian cultural ties, but it was more a celebration of the pianist’s art.

Biddau is solemn in presentation, forcefully concentrating on one thing, the keyboard, and except to take the occasional bow, he played this demanding concert straight through.

Opening with Sonata in B Minor K 173 and Sonata in D major, K.29, both by Domenico Scarlatti, on whom he is a noted expert, we saw Biddau performing the first work with mathematical precision, giving way in Sonata in D major to breathtaking complexity so that each hand seemed to be working quite independently at times.

What followed was a complete change in mood with Brahms op 118 Brahms’s Six Pieces for Piano, (Klavierstucke) Op. 118, which incidentally were published with a dedication to Clara Schumann.

Here Biddau played with deep feeling, varying from the serious in the second movement to virtuosic display in movement IV, (Allegretto un poco Agitato) and concluding in the final movement on a solemn, deep note, according to its enticing musical description, Largo e Mesto, “slow and with dignity”.

After a quick bow, he was back at the keyboard to perform Gabriel Fauré’s Ballade Op 18, dazzling with his flying fingers, which almost teased the audience as they move through Fauré’s elaborate arpeggios and scales, a nod perhaps to his early piano studies  in Paris.

The concert culminated in a fiery rendition of Chopin’s Andante spianato et grande polonaise brillante, played with gusto but, as in the rest of the concert, with scarcely a smile.