JOHN Lill returns to Glasgow Royal Concert Hall tomorrow evening to play a Beethoven programme, culminating in the composer’s last piano sonata, Opus 111. The pianist, renowned for his Beethoven interpretations, chose the Steinway grand piano for the then new GRCH in 1990.

THE PIANIST

(John Lill plays Beethoven’s Opus 111)

Prince in the landscape of another’s mind

You stride through thickets of abstraction

Where others stumble, sensing the

Grand design, the view beyond the mountain,

That unattainable place of necessary striving.

Big, unvain man, transfigured by your art,

Your brain and hands a conduit for Beethoven’s thoughts.

And so, through you, the opening challenge,

Thrown at the wind, the ominous rumbling,

Erupting into argument of glorious masculinity.

Next, the Arietta, hanging in air,

Suspended in time, music beyond metaphor

(And yet how else to indicate response?).

The transcendental theme yields to elaboration,

Succumbs to syncopation (Beethoven as jazzman?).

Then the slow unwinding, the fearsome double trills.

Patterned in pages, rather than in bars,

The music moves to resolution,

Reconciliation even, if one takes these sounds

To be the absolute language of humanity.

Thus, when the final unemphatic silence comes

Why should it leave an absurd sense of loss?