Athletic and ambitious recital by British-Chinese pianist Noah Zhou

Transcribing a piano concerto for solo piano relies on two contradictory impulses that must be kept in tension.

- Geoffrey Lim

The first is accessibility the making available of works that otherwise require the resources of a full orchestra to a lone instrumentalist. The second is bravado — the magnificent concentration of power and material in the hands of a single, swaggering virtuoso.

The downside of this Promethean trade-off is the removal of the conversational duality between orchestra and soloist that is fundamental to the form of a concerto. In addition to playing all the notes (more than one would have had to play in the original), the pianist must somehow give the sense of two entities in dialogue rather than deliver an extended soliloquy.