A truly terrifying sight this afternoon. The Wigmore Hall: full of children. A group of 50 10- to 13-year-olds were filing in to hear their first classical concert. On this one event a lifetime’s attitude to an entire art form would be based. It was make or break time. The concert would have to have been very carefully chosen. Hm. What had these wise teachers picked for these impressionable young rookies to ease their ears into the tough world of classical music? A lunchtime chamber recital of the works of Guillaume de Machaut, Harrison Birtwistle and Johannes Ockeghem. My instinct was to call social services.

There’s simply no orchestral sound quite like it. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra had barely done a bar of Bedřich Smetana’s overture to The Bartered Bride before I found myself grinning like a fool. It was as if I had stepped off a plane and walked into a bath of fresh foreign sun. The biting cold of winter had temporarily lifted for those who had made it to the Barbican this weekend. Spring had come early.

 

Even Schubert’s very earliest compositions terrify. His first songs, written when he was only 13, are unforgettably vivid, gory, messy, mangled, full of darkness and horror, like dead little birds. He never shakes off this Gothic sensibility; it’s never ironed out of him. A part of him remains untutored, untamed, right to the end, and over time his dark preoccupations gather a more and more frightening shape. Pitch blackness is reached in his Piano Sonata in A minor, D784, one of strangest pieces in the whole piano repertoire, a work of utter nightmarishness and a focal point for last night’s stunning all-Schubert recital from Imogen Cooper.