piano
Peter Quantrill
The key of C minor threw a dark shadow over music long before it became the tonality for Beethoven to express the struggle of one against many in the Fifth Symphony and the Third Piano Concerto. Mozart was a feted teenager and Beethoven a babe in arms when Haydn wrote his C minor Piano Sonata in 1771, 60 years before Schumann began to make his own inner turmoil into music in the wake of Beethoven. Yet through silence as much as sound, Paul Lewis made something personal and almost confessional from the Sonata’s slow introduction, placing the full tonal weight of the Wigmore’s Steinway at the Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
As our friends across the pond celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday, a mix of music from America kicked off the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s concert, opening with Massachusetts-born composer Carl Ruggles’s Angels for muted brass. Ruggles originally penned the work in 1920 as the second movement of a three-part piece entitled Men and Angels. It was scored for six muted trumpets, but the 1938 revision which was performed on Thursday features four trumpets and muted trombones; it's also transposed down a minor third. Tenderly played by the brass of the BBC SSO, it had a touching, Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Following the break-up of The Jam in 1982, Mick Talbot (b 1958) was chosen by Paul Weller as his sparring partner in a new band, The Style Council. Talbot, a keyboard player from south London, had flourished amid the late-Seventies Mod revival, initially in the Merton Parkas, with his brother Danny, but also in The Chords, and even appearing on a couple of The Jam’s records.Weller’s plan was to escape the lad-friendly guitar sound of The Jam. With The Style Council, he and Talbot explored soul, funk, jazz, R&B, easy listening, and more, resulting in a golden run of Top 20 hits that lasted Read more ...
David Nice
Beethoven anniversary year would not have been complete without witnessing a masterly live interpretation of his 33 ever more questing piano variations on a jolly waltz. This one was revelatory. Could I have afforded it, had there been more performances and not sold out, I’d have returned to be helped as never before in further understanding some of the mysteries, weirdnesses and journeys to the strangest of other worlds. I couldn’t and there weren’t. But the one evening (actually the second) just before a second lockdown, and stomach-churning anxiety about the American election left at the Read more ...
graham.rickson
Henrique Oswald: Piano Concerto, Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto No. 5 Clélia Iruzun (piano), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra/Jac van Steen (Somm)You can never have enough of Saint-Saëns’ Piano Concerto No. 5, a piece tailor-made to soothe and delight during stressful times. It gets better and better with repeated listenings. Where to start? With the opening bars – a few seconds of perfumed incense, before the piano’s innocent, unadorned entry. We’re a long way from the Brahms D minor. Clélia Iruzun gets the work’s playfulness and charm, knowing exactly when to inject some adrenalin or pull Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
How loud can the applause from a scanty, socially-distanced audience sound? Thunderous enough, as the response to Sir András Schiff’s back-to-back recitals at the Wigmore Hall proved. On both Sunday and Monday evenings, the happy few of 112 – the venue’s Covid-era maximum – did their depleted best to raise the roof in answer to Schiff’s unstintingly, and typically, lavish commitment. He gave us 100 uninterrupted minutes of Janáček and Schumann on the first night, capped the next day by the epic trio of Beethoven’s final piano sonatas, op.109, 110 and 111 (with some Bach thrown in for good Read more ...
David Nice
How do they do it? Bach and Angela Hewitt, I mean, transfixing and focusing the audience in the Wigmore Hall – at home, too, hopefully, thanks to the livestreaming– through 13 and three-quarter fugues and four canons, all starting in the same key and (until the last) on the same theme, plus a benediction, the glorious whole amounting to an hour and a half without a break. No-one knows quite how the master intended his final studies in counterpoint to be performed, or even on what instrument(s), but in this superlative pianist’s hands the sequence makes total sense – centred, radical-sounding Read more ...
David Nice
Composer Gian-Carlo Menotti once asked rhetorically what society wanted of performing artists – “the bread of life or the after-dinner mint?” There were a couple of audience members last night – unique in my experience so far of the Fidelio Orchestra Café’s set-up – who clearly wanted pianist Charles Owen’s recital to be the pre-dinner amuse-bouche; one was reading a book from the start, another came down from upstairs during the music to demand a bottle of wine. But generally the small groups of attendees have relished what we’ve had on every musical programme, from Isserlis via Ibragimova Read more ...
David Nice
A front-rank pianist only takes on Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in full confidence of being able to handle the massive bells and blazing chants of its grand finale, “The Great Gate of Kiev”. To risk it in a far from large café space adds to the element of danger and excited anticipation. Louis Schwizgebel, sonorous master of the house Bechstein – already an instrument designed not to overwhelm – carried it off with high radiance. It will be a long time before we can experience again the full orchestral blaze of Ravel’s peerless orchestration, so this was – despite even the pianist’s Read more ...
David Nice
There is genius not only in the rainbow hues of Pavel Kolesnikov’s playing but also in the way his chosen programmes resonate. He’s given us interconnected wonders from across the centuries, but chose to focus on the greatest of composers for the piano in only his third such recital. His first all-Chopin concert was given in sentimental homage to his birthplace, Novosibirsk; the second was a BBC Lunchtime Prom of Mazurkas; and this third, under circumstances even more exceptional than the Prom, brought light to his first UK audience after lockdown – a privileged 25 of us each evening.In Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
A decade ago, Polly Scattergood was Mute Records’ newest, most-likely-to signing and, while she never crossed over like similar unconventional female artists of the period (Bat For Lashes, St Vincent, Anna Calvi, etc), she has a developed a cult following. Where her previous two solo albums combined vaguely Björk-ish gossamer vocals with a delicately smudged take on electro-pop, In This Moment, no longer on Mute, untethers itself into artier territory. Enjoyment depends on how far the listener is willing to follow her.One notable difference from what came before is a tendency towards spoken Read more ...
Marianka Swain
A musical featuring two people who are physically separated? Jason Robert Brown’s work is a shutdown natural – as this new digital theatre version demonstrates. Lauren Samuels and Danny Becker, who play doomed lovers Cathy and Jamie, recorded their parts entirely in isolation, with Samuels (previously starring as Cathy in 2011 at Chiswick Playhouse) also directing.The result is a piece that firmly retains its theatrical DNA – in contrast to the Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan-starring movie adaptation, which changed up the format to have the characters sharing space. Of course, current social Read more ...