piano
Jessica Duchen
The Wigmore Hall’s triumphant series of lockdown lunchtime concerts by the finest of local recitalists is not without an audience; it’s just that the performers can’t see them. Conversely, online viewers can watch the artists closely enough to see what fingering pianists choose for the awkward passages, and the sound quality is remarkably fine - though may also depend on your computer or smartphone (I heard Steven Isserlis’s recital the other day on my phone from the middle of Richmond Park). It’s welcome, as it’s all we have at present, but I, for one, refuse to accept that bone-chilling Read more ...
Paul Lewis
As an instrumentalist, you can sit down and play music and escape from the stress. It’s a privilege to be able to do something that takes you to a different place – you’re removed from everything that’s happening. When you stop, there are reminders all around, though: worry about the health of friends and family, and concern about when we’re going to play concerts again and what it’s going to be like when we do.I like a bit of structure to my day so that I don’t swim around in lots of time. I practise in the morning until lunchtime. The kids are learning online, so in the afternoon I help Read more ...
David Nice
In an atmosphere of uncertainty created by a government desperate to boost the economy despite the COVID-19 infection rate not reducing significantly, some UK venues and organisations are moving responsibly towards some kind of new normality. The Wigmore Hall has lunchtime concerts every weekday from 1 June, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and livestreamed on the hall's website. The BBC Proms has announced live concerts for the last two weeks of "the biggest music festival in the world", with plenty online before that. Meanwhile, it's time to focus again on some great instrumentalists.Igor Levit in Read more ...
Joseph Moog
It can be found in any contract. Both artists, as well as promoters, are aware of it, but it used to be an exception so rare that only a few have ever experienced it: the clause of "force majeure". Now it is sadly commonplace in the world of the performing arts.Who could have ever imagined a scenario as serious and drastic as the one we are currently experiencing? When I first read about this mysterious new virus in early January 2020, I thought back to similar headlines surrounding the swine influenza or SARS outbreaks in recent years. The feeling was similar and the potential threat was Read more ...
David Nice
One person playing one instrument from home to the edification and delight of thousands: it's been a constant in these confining days, and well meant even if the sound isn't always up to it, a necessary substitute for live communication on both sides. But this is something else: an education, a detailed sharing of love and consolation which makes me wonder why other musicians haven't taken up the challenge (maybe some have, but I haven't heard about it). The fact is that few can match Jeremy Denk's ease of playing as he talks, his infinite knowledge of the richest sets of piano music in the Read more ...
Steven Osborne
How fast the world can change. What seemed unimaginable just weeks ago, the effective shuttering of our societies, is now a reality in many countries for at least weeks and quite possibly several months to come. I hope for the health and security of all of you reading this. I’m not going to reflect on our situation at any length as I’m sure many of you have read far more on the subject than is good for you - I certainly have! - but rather I want to talk about an idea that came to me a few days ago that gave me a lot of pleasure.As I reflected on months at home without concerts and thought Read more ...
David Nice
Maybe it's not so surprising that the musicians one has long thought of as true Menschen of the profession - that applies to both sexes, of course, and maybe it's just more about the artists in question being natural communicators - have been among the first to rally in the current crisis.Today it's time to highlight two pianists: Igor Levit, at home in Berlin (which was one of the first cities to feel the effect of lockdown; Levit pictured below by Peter Meisel), quickly launched an evening series live via Twitter, 18:00 UK time, 19:00 CET. The sound is terrible, the playing magnificent Read more ...
David Nice
Three works two centuries apart, two of them rarities, with 100/200 years between each: that's no guarantee for programming success, and no way to fill a hall (though the London Philharmonic Orchestra admin deserves a good medal for the intricacy of its “2020 Vision” series planning, linked to the Beethoven anniversary and explained by Gavin Dixon in his review of Vladimir Jurowski’s launch concert earlier this month). Yet focused, febrile energy connected it all, from the solo-piano chords at the beginning of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto – a rare start to an orchestral concert, and from Read more ...
David Nice
When Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski first bounced on to the concert scene, he seemed part will-o-the-wisp, part jack-in-the-box, a real personality of coruscating brilliance. Time has passed, and deeper, more reflective qualities have emerged alongside the fireworks, an impression very much underlined by his intent in launching his latest CD with Prokofiev's Tales of an Old Grandmother - short, predominantly introspective miniatures which are difficult to place in a concert programme. Indeed, I'd not heard them in that context until last night, where their place at the start of an Read more ...
David Nice
In Beethoven anniversary year, there are three ways to enhance our ongoing concert dialogues with the composer beyond the bog-standard overture-concerto-symphony format: complete cycles of the quartets, symphonies and sonatas, preferably without old vulgarians presenting; focusing on Beethoven and his contemporaries, including programmes recreated from the early 1800s; and linking the genius with what our own contemporaries have to say about him.By making its own unique tribute to the whopping "academies" the composer presented, not least in the 1808 blockbuster which included the premieres Read more ...
David Nice
"New Dawns" as a title smacked a bit of trying to shoehorn a fairly straightforward Aurora programme in to Kings Place's Nature Unwrapped series. Only Dobrinka Tabakova's short and sweet Dawn made the link, and that was old, not new (composed in 2007). Maybe the dawn intended in Mozart's C minor Piano Concerto, K491. was the way in which its opening theme embraces all 12 notes of the chromatic scale, while there is certainly some shock of the new in Beethoven's First Symphony (also being played over at the Royal Festival Hall by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Jurowski, such are the Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
For travellers, “music is a passport, especially in Russia…” Borrowing an adage from the British diplomat Thomas Preston, Sophy Roberts could be speaking about the eccentric quest that lies behind The Lost Pianos of Siberia. Preston, as consul in Yekaterinburg through the Russian Revolution and ensuing Civil War, no doubt needed all the extra cultural support he could find, witnessing control of the city pass between the Bolsheviks and the Whites, and living there when the Imperial family met its end. That tragic page of history provides a chapter for Roberts, loosely following her search for Read more ...