Acclaimed British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor dazzles in a Sunday morning solo piano recital. The pieces all originally designed for orchestra, and all being played in their solo piano form at the Proms for the first time. Performing well over an hour of works by Ravel, Debussy and Liszt, Grosvenor plays everything completely from memory, showcasing unbelievable strength, stamina, and attention to detail in every note.

The main event is Ravel’s 1917 Le Tombeau de Couperin (Couperin’s Elegies), a suite of six, five-minute odes to friends loved and lost, in an ornamented homage to Baroque composer François Couperin. Grosvenor delivers on the suite’s need for force and finesse in equal measure.

Grosvenor’s sheer muscular force is best showcased in the recital’s final piece, Ravel’s 1920 La Valse (The Waltz), which demands fortissimo glissandi up and down the piano with actual fists. But Liszt’s 1841 showman medley from Bellini’s opera Norma (1831) comes across as a bit heavy-handed.

The highlight of the entire recital is probably a 1920 transcription of Debussy’s dreamy and delicate 1894 Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to a faun’s afternoon), with parallel octaves in the right hand miraculously legato, over the top of endlessly churning colours in the left hand: an understated, technical marvel.

In Grosvenor’s own words, piano transcriptions of orchestral works are like black-and-white photographs: “while colour is lost, new perspectives are gained”.

Tickets for all 71 Proms are available from just £8 on the BBC Proms 2023 website.