Nobuyuki Tsujii Piano Recital

Nobuyuki Tsujii plays the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on Sunday 1 November, starting at 14:30. He's a Japanese pianist who's been blind since birth, and he's played the city many times before. The Philharmonic describes him as a 'piano phenomenon' who brings technical mastery and virtuosic warmth to the stage.

The programme runs through several distinct moods. He opens with Mozart's Fantasia in C minor, K. 475, followed by Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 23 'Appassionata'. From there, the set shifts to Grieg's Lyric Pieces, Book 1, and closes with Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker Suite, in the arrangement by Mikhail Pletnev. It's a broad spread: Mozart's imaginative writing, Beethoven's intensity, Grieg's smaller, characterful pieces, and the orchestral scale of The Nutcracker brought down to a single piano.

Tsujii has been playing on some of the world's biggest stages since he broke through. In 2009, he won the joint Gold Medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, which led the competition's founder to call him 'absolutely miraculous'. Since then, he's played Carnegie Hall, the Royal Albert Hall and Wigmore Hall in London, the Vienna Musikverein, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, and Suntory Hall in Tokyo. The Observer called him the 'definition of virtuosity'.

He's also been the subject of two films by director Peter Rosen: the 2014 documentary Touching the Sound: The Improbable Journey of Nobuyuki Tsujii, and A Surprise in Texas, a 2010 film about the 13th Van Cliburn Competition. The recital is at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on Hope Street, L1 9BP, on Sunday 1 November at 14:30.