Jayson Gillham’s Recital at Ripon

Ripon Cathedral Concert Society has for a number of years provided some of the most exciting chamber music concerts in North Yorkshire. A year or so ago its future was, with declining audiences and diminishing resources, uncertain. However, a largely new committee has taken over and, with the opening concert of the season on Monday 2^nd December, it bounced back into life. An almost capacity audience was riveted by the extraordinary playing of Jayson Gillham, a young Australian pianist who had been a finalist at the 2012 Leeds Piano Competition. Apart from anything else, he displayed such a range of talent: capturing the architecture of a Beethoven sonata, achieving delicacy and rhythmic subtlety in Debussy, meeting the bravura demands of Liszt, and finally bringing it all together in a romantic interpretation of Chopin’s opus 10 Etudes. We can now look forward to the remaining concerts in the series