Music / Introspections, Ida Pelliccioli, piano. At Wesley Music Centre, April 24. Reviewed by MICHAEL WILSON.

As a rising performer, Ida Pelliccioli eschewed the big and glamorous concert stage for a more intimate performing career,  and one that had room for other interests and experimentation.

Born in Italy and educated in France, Pelliccioli studied piano and performance at conservatories in Nice and Paris, and Italian literature and ancient history at the Sorbonne. She pairs contemporary music with earlier traditions, and a recent project concentrates on matching musical repertoire and fine wines!

Pelliccioli’s recital at the Wesley Music Centre was more orthodox and, at the same time, quite innovative. She picked a program of 15 short pieces by five composers that speak to the inner self. Sometimes meditative, sometimes playful and joyful, sometimes wistful and sometimes sad, this set of compositions might each be employed most commonly as encores after performances of larger works. Pelliccioli pieced them together quite magically to establish a contemplative mood punctuated with moments of drama and comforting familiarity.

As a pianist, Pelliccioli is businesslike and unfussy. Had she not started the concert with Six Impromptus by Jean Sibelius, she might have been received as a little too straightforward. But Sibelius’ piano music requires such tact, such delicacy and subtle colour change, to carry off, that any reservations were immediately dispelled. Her exquisitely judged pushes and pulls, and the way she leant in to pauses, made the performance of this Finnish folk song-inspired suite simply exquisite in the intimate space of the recital room.

Moving straight into the capriccio and improvisation from Gabriel Fauré’s Eight Short Pieces, Pelliccioli explained how these works weren’t originally intended for performance – certainly not together,  but had been composed as sight-reading exercises for piano students.  This was unkind of Faure: both works are devilishly difficult, with timing and key changes and unexpected modulations and intervals. Again, Pelliccioli carried them off with aplomb and the right touch of drama.

Following Ferruccio Busoni’s not-really-very-Bach-like Fantasia after JS Bach, Janáček’s four-part cycle In the Mists is a contrasting journey through moods with a harp-like character. Pelliccioli first rendered sensitive progressions of parallel chords towards a forceful and loud (but still introspective?) climax. The second movement has a more regimented theme, but surrounded by less formal babblings on the top and bottom of the keyboard. The final movement is stern and serious, and grand in almost a Gershwin-like way, but allowed Pelliccioli to finish with a triumphant flourish.

Finishing with two Ravel Menuets, resisting that composer’s mechanical tendencies, Pelliccioli treated the audience to two further encores, making a total of 75 minutes of unbroken performance, all played from memory.

Ida Pelliccioli’s style is friendly and engaging rather than authoritative and grand. But she showed she is a rare master of the keyboard – across a broad range of composers and styles and atmospheres, confidently expressed and extremely technically accomplished.

From this taste and maybe despite her reservations, it would be wonderful to see her play with an orchestra, or even a band!