piano
Ed Vulliamy
“Death doesn’t scare me at all,” said my friend Christopher Hitchens during our last telephone conversation. “After all, it’s the only certainty in life. Dying, however, scares me shitless”.However hard one tries to remove these three final sonatas from the narrative of Franz Schubert’s life and imminent death from syphilis when he wrote them, this is inescapably what they are about: fear not of one’s own obliteration, but the process of getting there. But also insolent defiance of obliteration, and validation of life lived.Paul Lewis’s recordings of these sonatas, and live renderings during Read more ...
The Art of Fugue, Schiff, Nosrati, Wigmore Hall review - rarity and quality in music and performance
Ed Vulliamy
At the start of his 75-minute pre-concert lecture on Sunday, the incomparable András Schiff staked quite a claim for the piece he was about to perform: Bach’s The Art of Fugue was, he said: “the greatest work by the greatest composer who ever lived”.And a wise one: this concert was only the second time he would ever play it, the first having been in Berlin last January. Because, he said: “I’ve waited 70 years to play this work… You cannot climb Mount Everest immediately… this is the climax.”He continued with a poetic clarity akin to that of the piece itself. On the fact that it is unfinished Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
To judge by the post-interval empty seats near me, some of the Cadogan Hall audience had turned up last night solely to hear Nikolai Lugansky play Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto. Well, the more fool them. For sure they would have enjoyed their not so-brief encounter with a truly distinguished Russian pianist – noble standard-bearer for a grand tradition – who gave a finely-polished, well-shaped rendition of this beloved old story (on the eve of Valentine’s Day, too). However, any early quitters would have missed the generous panoply of French orchestral showpieces gift-wrapped for us by Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
The mood was indeed celebratory at Glasgow’s City Halls on Friday evening for the second of two concerts celebrating the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s 50th birthday. It opened with a suite from Figaro Gets a Divorce, a comic opera written by composer Eleanor Langer to a text from director and librettist David Pountney which was premiered by Welsh National Opera in 2016.As the title suggests, it was written as a sequel to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, and is based partly on the play La Mère coupable by Pierre Beaumarchais, the third and least known of his Figaro trilogy. The orchestra Read more ...
David Nice
Successful performances, conductor Robin Ticciati once suggested to me, are when “the head has a conversation with the heart”. The same goes, surely, for great music, though from personal experience one has to reach a certain age to find that true of Brahms. Last night Igor Levit seemed to favour the head, occasionally missing, for me, that very elusive something at the heart of Brahms’s late piano pieces.There can be no question of his magisterial oversight, though, or of how well 20 pieces in four consecutive opus numbers work in sequence. It was clear, for instance, how turbulence in one Read more ...
David Nice
With rapid, sleight-of-hand flicks between calm assurance and demonic agitation, Boris Giltburg turned in a coherent and epic recital that won’t be surpassed in 2024. Most pianists would quake simply at the thought of performing the four Chopin Scherzos in sequence; Giltburg set them up with phenomenal insights into Scriabin and Schumann.He went in deep with perfect space around the noble beginnings of Scriabin’s relatively early (1890s) Second Sonata, that side of the composer very much, in Boris Pasternak’s words, “as tranquil and lucent as God resting from his labours on the seventh day”. Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
For a small nation, with a population not quite comparable to Scotland’s, Georgia has for long packed a mighty musical punch. Any visitor will know the soul-wrenching power of its choral polyphony, but a post-Soviet generation of classical soloists now walks proudly across the world stage. Pianist Mariam Batsashvili, only just 30, won the Franz Liszt international competition in 2014 and has since been a BBC New Generation artist. Last night’s Wigmore Hall recital (not her first) put Liszt’s music at the heart of a programme that revealed the almost-symphonic textures and colours that a Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
A decade has passed since Paul Lewis concluded an endeavour of a kind never previously undertaken: to perform, over two and a half years and across four continents, every work Schubert wrote for piano between 1822, the year he was diagnosed with syphilis – ergo, knew he was dying – and his death in 1828.It was quite an odyssey for those of us who followed those concerts (in my case, across two of those continents), and apparently for Lewis too, as he revisits selections from that programme, adding other, earlier, Schubert sonatas for a scaled-down version of those tours, this time across Read more ...
Simon Thompson
Nobody would describe Felix Mendelssohn as a fringe composer, but his piano concertos aren’t exactly central classical repertoire either. They lack the foundational status of Mozart’s and the high Romantic seriousness of Beethoven’s or Brahms’, and Mendelssohn doesn’t help himself in the way that an air of the faintly hilarious hangs around his First Piano Concerto.It’s often so hyperactive that it’s impossible to take it seriously, with an almost comically energetic first movement that feels like a greyhound straining at the trap, and a finale so light-hearted that it’s almost a self-parody. Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
When Ben Folds emerged in the mid-90s he was like Billy Joel’s snot-nosed little brother: another virtuoso pianist and songwriter but one whose style was sarcastic, subversive and a little bit punky.He has now mellowed into something of an elder statesman, still able to get the room jumping, but also capable of meditation on the state of the world, on getting older, on human relationships, all wrapped up in the catchiest tunes around.Folds has only released two albums in the last 11 years, but What Matters Most, which came out in June, sees him back to his best after the underwhelming So Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To watch virtuoso jazz pianist Hiromi perform is to experience a vast weather system of sound; at some moments exuberant hailstorms of notes alternate with thunderous chords, at others, sombre atonal passages resolve into a burst of sunshine.By any standards she’s a remarkable stage presence; at the same time as segueing effortlessly between three keyboards, she laughs, stands up and sits down, conducts the other performers and sometimes claps along. Whatever you think of this party, she’s certainly having a ball.It’s the complete lack of self-consciousness that contributes to what – from Read more ...
Robert Beale
The showman was back – and, bless him, he can still sell every seat in a big hall even if the programme offers close on an hour and a half of unalloyed Bach.Lang Lang’s gifts are phenomenal: he doesn’t just play music brilliantly, every now and then he plays with it, putting his own twist of fun or pathos or bravura where few would venture to try. It can be utterly mesmerising; it can be quirky, if not exasperating. And so he did with the aria and 30 variations for keyboard known to us as the Goldbergs.He preceded it with Schumann’s Arabeske, Op. 18, as if needing to warm the atmosphere a Read more ...