Wigmore Hall
jonathan.wikeley
The great and the good came to Imogen Cooper’s 60th birthday concert. In fact, so thick with friends and fellow pianists was the Wigmore Hall, that at the end there seemed to be as many people going backstage to congratulate her as were leaving through the front doors. In that quietly embarrassing, I-hope-no-one-saw way, after some light-hearted Schumann, I thought for a moment she flashed a smile at me and – charmed – smiled back, but it turned out that I was sitting behind Brendel. It was that sort of audience.Perhaps it wasn’t such a difficult mistake to make. This was a genteel tea- Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
Andrew Parrott, director of the Taverner Consort, once told me of a time he was playing harpsichord at the back of a largish orchestra. Confident that nothing he played would stand the remotest chance of being heard above the general cacophony, he “rather went to town” in his realisation of the continuo part. Afterwards he was congratulated by numerous audience members sat at the back of the hall on his stylish, if unconventional, interpretation. The sound had gone up into the air and bounced straight to the back, giving everyone in the rear four rows a crystal-clear account of his lavish Read more ...
Ismene Brown
When you go to a Schubert recital, you’re plunged into a whirlpool of emotional ambivalence, heat and chill running together, music and lyrics not always playing the same tune. When Schubert seizes on a poem, it’s not because he’s interested in Mickey-Mousing that poet’s sentiments - on the contrary, he may see a purple passage of words and set it simply, as if deflating it, or he may take a plain statement of action (looking out of a window, say) and fill that phrase with complex music containing a world of dark feeling.When Matthias Goerne is the singer, this counterpoint gets a third layer Read more ...
jonathan.wikeley
What a splendid little ensemble the Purcell Quartet is. The sort of group that you rather hope might reduce in size as the years go on, so that in the end you can put them in your pocket and carry them around with you all the time. If ever an ensemble could provide a soundtrack to the ups and downs of life then this is it.Which is just as well really, because this little celebration of Purcell’s music covered the whole gamut of emotions, from heart-wrenching song to boisterous sonata to the frankly ludicrous When the Cock Begins to Crow, replete with busy bees, singing crickets and lazy sluts Read more ...