This sometimes made for rhythmic confusion, and scale passages in the right hand were so fast they almost became glissandos.Towards the end of the finale, perversely, the double-octave descents, which are sometimes played as glissandos, were beautifully articulated as proper scales, which goes to show that Donohoe’s outstanding technical facility serves the music at certain times better than others. In both outer movements of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata, there were passages in which Donohoe’s digital fluency seemed to run ahead of any human brain. The second, a very tender piece, sang out broadly rather than taking us into its confidence. Yet it was the quieter contrasting sections of the next two pieces that, in their understated way, compelled attention. If you had to summarise Donohoe’s view of such diverse music, it would be something like rock-like stoicism, summed up in the massive climax of the final Intermezzo, derived from its desolate opening idea.If stoicism implies, in musical terms, reliably sustained tempos, it must be said that much of the programme was far from stoic. He himself said that he hoped that the combination of pieces represented his musical personality – or, he might have said, his several selves.
He began with the last-but-one of Brahms’s late sets of pieces, the six of Op 118, launching the first with a sense of massive grandeur, rather than the mobile urgency that it is possible to read into it. To open another series of piano recitals on the South Bank – and, incidentally, to celebrate his 50th birthday – Peter Donohoe chose a programme that might have been set as a test of any pianist’s versatility.

But it’s only a beginning: she plans to build on it further, for a new commission for Sadler’s Wells next year.In the meantime, she is returning to Belize – “I’ve begun to realise that its lush beauty is still lurking in me, influencing what I do.” But when she gets back into her little white car, it’s off to a club in Birmingham, where she’ll deliver some songs including her jazzy take on an aria from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas.A Nitro at the Opera starts on Sunday at 1pm, at the Royal Opera House, London WC1 (020-7304 4000); free, but booking of entrance is advisable. That makes me very angry.”Wallen’s opera to be unveiled on Sunday – all 20 minutes of it – is entitled Another America: Earth. “The idea germinated while I was at an artists’ colony in America, and met a painter who was copying American 19th-century landscape painters, but reworking them in lurid colours, and adding in details that weren’t in the originals – a lynching, say, or some other racial cruelty.” The piece is apparently set in Grapes of Wrath territory, and somehow also weaves in the discovery of planet Pluto. Black children are still being told not to step out of their box.

Unfortunately, it’s very easy to talk a young child out of doing something they want to do, to persuade them it’s not for them.” Then she widens the argument, to rail against the paucity of music provision in schools today. “Because it isn’t there any more, we’ve lost a whole generation of musicians, from right across society. There should be a joyfulness in music-making that is the complete antithesis of that.” Class barriers, she thinks, are less of an obstacle than is often made out: “Through film and TV, classical music crosses all social boundaries anyway.” But what does she feel when she looks at the 99 per cent whiteness of the average concert audience? “I’m not happy about that.” After a pause, she continues: “It starts in infancy. “Real musicians have never lived in a world of compartmentalisation.

But she’s also a veteran of the comedy circuit, having started out providing musical interludes for Rory Bremner and co. And she has developed a solo act as a singer-pianist, delivering her songs in a confidentially smoky timbre, over her own piano accompaniment. She’s a great duettist and chamber player, notably with Ensemble X, a group she formed under the motto: “We don’t break down barriers – we don’t see any.”She’ll have no truck with crossover, a word she regards as meaningless. You have to write from where you are.”Her multifarious activities over the past 20 years have made that “where you are” rather hard to pin down. Her compositions are nothing if not eclectic, with the most effective being a percussion concerto that operates on a big canvas with a very sure touch.