fri 29/03/2024

The Risør Festival at the Wigmore Hall | reviews, news & interviews

The Risør Festival at the Wigmore Hall

The Risør Festival at the Wigmore Hall

Pianists Andsnes and Hamelin go ballistic in the Rite of Spring

A hell of a lot of talent was on display last night at the Wigmore Hall, where pianist Leif Ove Andsnes's home festival of Risør was stationed for the weekend. The big draw was a performance of The Rite of Spring for two pianos. The work is violent enough in orchestral form but when jammed onto two keyboards it has the potential to degenerate into the most unimaginably demented hand-to-hand combat you'll ever see. Last night's performance - Andsnes facing off against a man that gets pianophiles like me pant-wettingly excited, Marc-André Hamelin - was little short of psychopathic.

Hamelin possesses a technique that is so exceptionally all-encompassing that he cannot be contained within the limits of the term virtuoso but instead clings onto our species (just) as a super-virtuoso. This is to be witnessed in knife-thrower precision and perfectly calibrated textures, which were as dry as a serial killer's brow last night. Not inappropriate as it happens. As they pummelled their way through the piece, alternating blows, Andsnes and Hamelin (pictured below right) began to remind me of those feral hit men of the early Coen brothers' films.

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The violent episodes were encountered with coolness, calmness and absolute savagery. Efficiency and brutality was the name of this game. And it was mesmerising. Even the voices of the victims weren't given respite. There was a dark foreshadowing of what was to come even in that sometimes hopeful opening melody. But this rendition wasn't just about waves of aural harassment and bloody bludgeoning. Hamelin's subito pianissimo trills and the stunned melodic lines of Part Two were almost as dramatic as the hammer blows and bullet-train hocketing. Even the way Hamelin unfurled his fingers to play the final Ritual before the Sacrificial Dance was transfixing in its slow psychopathic curl.

A similar intensity was to be had from the performance of the Berg Four Pieces for clarinet and piano, Op 5. At first it seemed that clarinettist Martin Fröst and Andsnes were offering up some kind of Salome-like expressionist dance with musical accompaniment, so much were they moving and so sinuous were the moves. The Four Pieces offers up the fin de siècle in pill form. It twists and turns, now with explosive, now with brooding, force, snatching at the outside world (a fun fair, a funeral march) and an interior one too, and throwing it all out within the space of five minutes. Fröst and Andsnes seemed to deliver this entire flickering universe in one long breath and, before I knew it, it was gone and I was longing for it to return.

'This was without doubt the most patronisingly undemanding, offensively literal, character-free new work of the year'

Not something I was wishing at the end of Rolf Wallin's new work Under City Skin for viola, strings and surround sound. It was apparently an attempt to explore the urban jungle, yet it offered only a few baby steps in one tedious direction. The viola rolled a few banal ideas around in its mouth. The string ensemble did likewise. And the techies surrounded us, apparently, with the sounds of the city. I say, apparently, because I love cities and I've never heard a city sound so dull in my life. This was without doubt the most patronisingly undemanding, offensively literal, character-free new work of the year.

Having said all that, it was understandable why they paired it with Honegger's Second Symphony for string orchestra and trumpet. Both have a minimalist motor at their core. Wallin uses this as a springboard for what he thinks are the most extraordinary journeys into unventured realms. Honegger, on the other hand, attempts to summon up the tragedy of war. Whether Honegger succeeds is debatable. I'm never very convinced with any of the stabs at profundity that the various members of Les Six (very different as they all are) attempted. There's something inherently comic about their musical language; or perhaps that's only in retrospect. Whatever the case, for me this work is all about the final movement. And a splendid last movement it was. A Risør-made hot pot of string sound - bows and melodies flying every which way they could - was beautifully crowned by the melodious trumpet of Huw Morgan.

The admittedly genial violist of the Wallin work, Lars Anders Tomter, told us he was worried that we might have found the evening a little challenging and offered us a Bach Sarabande to sooth our disturbed minds. Not true, Mr Tomter. The only thing that was challenging about last night was understanding why Rolf Wallin's work was included in this otherwise fine programme.

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