David Stanhope is an Australian composer, conductor, horn player and bass trombonist who ‘occasionally finds time to practise the piano’. The irony of that last remark will not be lost when you hear him tackle some of the most formidable peaks of the virtuoso repertoire with an ease and grandeur that shame more celebrated pianists. He positively revels in Busoni’s joyous and opulent arrangement of Bach’s organ Prelude and Fugue in E flat and, enterprisingly prefacing his selection of Chopin-Godowsky Etudes with the originals (he plays all seven versions of Op 10 No 5), he spins off every intricacy with dazzling fluency.
Godowsky’s massive Passacaglia (music which caused even Horowitz to despair, claiming he needed at least six hands to perform it) is, again, played with a masterly aplomb and never more so than in the final pages, which seem to ignite the entire keyboard. Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony, given in Liszt’s loyal and exuberant transcription, could hardly be more Allegro vivace e con brio, and only the finale, taken at an audaciously fast tempo, suffers a lack of clarity. (This, and a sense – in Chopin’s Etude in thirds – of sheer facility substituting for more inward or poetic virtues, are marginal failings.)
Matters are made even more intriguing by the use of a Stuart piano, complete with four pedals (the fourth, called a ‘dolce’ is put to admirable use in the Busoni), a shallow but attractive sound and a conveniently light action. Stanhope’s delightfully haywire notes tell us that Godowsky’s Passacaglia is ‘easy’, ‘of extreme difficulty’ and ‘with only a few pages that are technically difficult’, and Tall Poppies’ sound is both immediate and refined.'