The Piano Alone

Thomas Kelly comes to St James's Piccadilly with three works, not one of which reached us in the form its composer first gave it.

Schubert never called the four pieces of Op. 90 "Impromptus." His Viennese publisher, Tobias Haslinger, put that word on them when he issued the first two in December 1827 — and the remaining two did not appear for another thirty years, brought out by Haslinger's son, who took the liberty of transposing the third from G flat into G.

Rachmaninoff took a single Chopin prelude — the C minor, barely a page and a half of music — and built twenty-two variations upon it.

And in 1848 Liszt sat down with Hummel's Grosses Septett and rewrote it, bar for bar, for one player. Hummel had been taught and housed by Mozart for two years, free of charge, from the age of eight; Liszt, by 1848, was the most celebrated pianist alive. It is a formidable piece of writing and it is seldom played.

Thomas Kelly is the Benjamin Britten Fellow at the Royal College of Music, the highest award the College gives a pianist, and took the Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother Rose Bowl on graduating in 2024. He was a prizewinner at the 2021 Leeds International Piano Competition and took second prize at the Liszt Utrecht Competition in January.

Programme

Schubert — Four Impromptus, Op. 90, D. 899
Rachmaninoff — Variations on a Theme of Chopin, Op. 22

Interval

Hummel / Liszt — Grosses Septett, S. 493

Thursday 22 October 2026, 7.30pm
Ends approximately 9.15pm
St James's Piccadilly, 197 Piccadilly, London W1J 9LL

Completed by Sir Christopher Wren in 1684, St James's Piccadilly is among London's most intimate and acoustically distinguished spaces.

Founded in 1921 as Britain's first professional chamber orchestra and honoured by the patronage of HM The Queen, the London Chamber Orchestra has shaped chamber music in the UK for over a century.

Smart evening attire.