Review – Kristian Bezuidenhout plays Schubert at Aldeburgh Festival 2026

Here it is with only those corrections made — nothing else touched.

Back in the days when our household took delivery of our first flat screen TV, there was a convention of such purchases coming with a tester DVD. This collection of must-watch scenes was designed to whet your appetite for the delights that could be rendered on aggressively expensive technology that now dominated our living room. What was the point of having it if we couldn’t see it do what it did best?

The first half of Kristian Bezuidenhout’s Aldeburgh Festival recital functions in much the same way. Two curated suites of shorter Schubert pieces, arranged to introduce the fortepiano on its own terms, in this acoustic, to this audience. An invitation to adjust. A test drive.

This worked, largely, partly down to the invitation to save our applause. The programming choices helped too. Fantasy in C minor D.2e was a bold opener that communicated youthful robustness, and indefatigable purpose. A darker Allegretto follows, a tender Adagio in C after that, before the comparatively subversive harmonic progressions of the A minor Minuet laid the ground for the more extensive and rewarding 13 Variations.

The second collection of shorts held attention less reliably than the first, though we arrive at the interval in the right place — an ambiguous Adagio in D flat that leaves audience members with a vaguely unresolved feeling, sufficient for some overheard to describe their anticipation of ‘the main event’ that followed in the second half.

Bezuidenhout conjures a sound that is crisp, proud, and robust. The articulation is disciplined and precise. Independent dynamic control between right and left hand. Detached phrasing in one, legato in the other and vice versa. Given the permutations offered combinations of pedals and finger pressure, the myriad sounds produced is something we quickly become accustomed to and maybe even end up taking for granted.

Bezuidenhout is tall and wiry, maintaining a still frame, with movement isolated in his fingers, wrists and occasionally his forearms. He sits upright and square to the keyboard — a beautifully deliberate sight to observe. It is as though the fortepiano has been made specifically to accommodate him. He is a craftsman at the keyboard, unassuming in presence, but not academic in approach. He contains his joy, leaving the rest of us to taste it in the sound he produces.

Bezuidenhout doesn’t indulge us in period authenticity so much as demonstrate the potential fortepianos presented Schubert. In the 13 Variations in A minor on a theme of Anselm Hüttenbrenner for example, chromatic inflections are given piquancy emphasising the freshness in the writing. There is here a sense that we’re listening to Schubert discovering the possibilities in the instrument himself. Similarly, muffled sequences convey distance or interiority, in particular in the Allegretto in C where a tender motif is given added vulnerability. Throughout this first half curation, the fortepiano gives Schubert’s music freshness, grit and heart. Clarity ensues, characters and personalities, moods and emotions more discernible. The idea of hearing any of this on a modern concert grand from this moment is some kind of shameful act of betrayal.

In the first movement of the E flat Piano Sonata D.568, I don’t want to watch him play, but instead marvel at the sound he produces. Bezuidenhout seems to follow an agreed pattern. It’s unfamiliar but it makes complete sense, as though the composer is working it on the page as the musician plays. We are working it out with the composer. Bezuidenhout’s sound is bright and crisp, sometimes muffled as though distant or heard through a wall. Different characters seem to interject or take over. This is the point in time when connections in my head are made with a similar experience listening to the Schubert Quintet yesterday [link] and the first tentative sense that maybe I finally get what Schubert is all about.

By the second movement there’s a sense this is all going to be over far too quickly and that I must, as a matter of priority, start ploughing through the entirety of Bezuidenhout’s output. In playing Bezuidenhout seems to move, think and feel in a different time. In creating what he does, he pulls us inexorably into his orbit. In doing so he creates a better world that, if we are lucky, we might hold onto.

Gently drawn out imperfect cadences in the third movement have the effect here of evoking creaking hinges — doors opening just wide enough to make the unknown draw you in. What follows in the fourth movement is a creeping sense of resolution. Bezuidenhout doesn’t overplay it — he gently coaxes the resolution out. He trusts the music will do its thing and invites us to do the same. Rallentandos and the pick ups that follow, feel earned, original and necessary. This isn’t hesitancy or unpredictability but unbridled joy, packaged and deployed neatly and efficiently. Every time they occur I recall my excitement as a kid suddenly bolting up the stairs for absolutely no reason. I hope there’s a recording on the way.