Sunday afternoon in the Lilian Piercey Concert Hall, Delahunt played Haydn, Beethoven and Chopin on his own Yamaha grand piano, a fine instrument he has temporarily garaged on the Piercey stage and made available to the students.

But it wasn't the right piano for the programmed Schubert Opus 42 Sonata in A minor. Ten minutes before the concert began, Delahunt decided the match of that particular instrument to that particular sonata wasn't a good idea. With scant minutes to go before he began the recital, he substituted the Chopin B Minor Sonata.

It was the last work on the program. You may not have known that Sonata when you went in. But when you went out you could never forget it. It begins with a roar that sang under Delahunt's fingers with a deep stentorian sound like Chaliapin, the great Russian basso, 75 years ago.

After volumes of poetry and tone painting, we arrive at the final movement. It's a heady experience, the closest thing to stunt flying in the piano repertoire. Delahunt guided the treble line through the blue sky of our listening minds, gliding, hedge-hopping, soaring up and rounding weightlessly over the top, diving in a dizzying vertical turn and haring away again, engine roaring, musical gravity sucking us down like a steel wrecking ball, then tossing us up like a feather.

In typical fashion, during the slow movement, delicate notes, played with wonderful spaciousness and transparency of touch, were often approached by bushels of notes, played with that sense of the motion of an escaped ski, an image poet

Leonard Cohen once used to describe what he meant by "a state of grace".

Delahunt's program began with an exquisite set of Variations in F Minor by Haydn. The music is watercolour to Chopin's oil painting. Matters of touch, of tempo, of gesture and image, of hue and tone, light and shade, mood and design—so many musical matters in such a compressed form—a tapestry in which colour and texture vividly play.

Beethoven's Six Bagatelles, opus 126 followed, short pieces once more popular than they are today when you seldom hear them on recitals. A bagatelle is a nothing, a disposable bit of wit and invention. But these you want to save. Coruscating moods, impulsive gestures, moments of repose and one or two good jokes like the loud TUM-ta-TUM gesture in the bottom end of the piano in (I think) the fourth bagatelle. A half-step below the key, it interrupts the charming little melody working itself out above, which tries to ignore it. But after a second, even harsher reminder, it chooses discretion over valour by continuing its meditation in the new key.

After the standing ovation following the final conflagration of the Chopin sonata, Delahunt returned to the stage to show the meditative Chopin of the Nocturne in B Major, Op. 32, No. 1. After such playing, there is little left to say except, Thank you, Walter.

spedersen@herald.ns.ca