Schubert
graham.rickson
Akira Miyoshi: Piano works Yukiko Kojima (piano) (Odradek)Akira Miyoshi was born in Tokyo in 1933. Listen blind to the earliest piece on this disc and you’d think it could be an early work by the late Henri Dutilleux, and it’s no surprise to read that Miyoshi studied in Paris in the 1950s. Miyoshi’s Piano Sonata was completed in 1958, and it’s an arresting, attractive piece. It’s at its best when the piano writing is stripped bare, the harmonies reduced to their essence. Miyoshi’s faster writing can be dizzily exciting, but can feel as if it’s merely obeying our expectations of what a Read more ...
David Nice
It’s not because I lament the annual end of a love-hate relationship with the Albert Hall that the last few days of Proms feel rather melancholy. A bittersweetness lies rather in the drawing-in of evenings, however hot it is, so late night Schubert for one and then two pianos seemed like an appropriately introspective way of saying farewell this year.Imogen Cooper – why on earth she’s not a dame is a big mystery, though perhaps not if you look at the honours set-up – can always be relied upon to draw you in to the light-fading of late Schubert. Sure enough, after the startling summons Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The moment when Alfred Brendel shuffled on stage during the Verbier Festival’s 20th Anniversary Concert not to play, but to turn pages for long-time colleague Emmanuel Ax, expressed everything that is so special, so extraordinary about this festival. Walking off together, arms around each other’s shoulders, these were not just international soloists, they were two great old men and two even greater musicians. Verbier has made a lot of good friends during its 20-year history – a mere blink of the eye, as classical festivals go – and in this birthday year it was no surprise that they might just Read more ...
David Nice
"Britten or Poulenc?" The question may seem a fatuous one, geared to the 100th anniversary of the Englishman's birth and 50 years since the Frenchman's death. Yet it certainly livens up what would otherwise be the usual dreary artists' biographies, presented with typical elan in this year's Cheltenham Music Festival programme book. "Has anyone said Poulenc in response to this?" asks pianist James Rhodes. Well, yes - no less than 13 of the performers, including doyenne of both composers Felicity Lott, as against 21 for Britten, with six "I couldn't possibly chooses" in the middle.Festival Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Maxim Vengerov’s four-year absence from the London stage is recent enough that any performance by him has the added value of having been clawed back from a jealous god. That a violinist of such explosive talent could have been permanently silenced by something as mundane as an injury sustained in the gym is barely thinkable, though the possibility seemed very real in the hinter years between 2008 and 2012.But back he is, and entirely on form too. That said – look away now if you deplore journalistic cliché – this was very much a concert of two halves: a solid but buttoned-up take on two early Read more ...
graham.rickson
John Cage 100 Various artists (Wergo)Wergo’s handsomely produced box set was assembled for last year’s John Cage centenary. Fans will lap it up, and one hopes that curious newcomers will take the plunge and open their ears to this extraordinary, approachable music. Joshua Pierce’s 1970s album of the Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano still sounds definitive. Cage’s Table of Preparations is included in the booklet, listing in alarming detail the position, size and orientation of every bolt, washer and screw inserted in Pierce’s piano. Inevitably, you start to wonder if the bell- Read more ...
David Nice
Viennese night in Glasgow’s Candleriggs was hardly going to be a simple matter of waltzes and polkas. True, its curtain-raiser was a Blue Danube with red blood in its veins rather than the anodyne river water of this year’s New Year concert from Austria’s capital; one would expect no less from Donald Runnicles after the refined but anaemic Franz Welser-Möst. In Runnicles’s programme, though, extreme contrast was all: J Strauss II spookily echoed by the elegiac 3/4s in Berg’s Violin Concerto, and another 12-tone boy, Webern, exercising restraint in arrangements of Schubert’s German Dances to Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
The billing for this all-Schubert concert, "Spira Mirabilis and Kate Royal", was a little misleading, since they did not actually share the stage at any point, the two halves being clearly separate events. First came the hour-long Octet, played by members of Spira Mirabilis, followed by half an hour of songs with Kate Royal accompanied by Malcolm Martineau.Now, there are no laws against presenting a salon evening of music by Schubert. In fact, it’s been going on for nearly 200 years, and it’s called a Schubertiade. It might even have been a selling point. But then, shouldn’t the Octet, with Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Why is music? A child’s question, a great question. One answered by Evgeny Kissin’s piano recital at London’s Barbican Centre last night, where you might want to engage analysis and come up later with answers but what happened was that you left the concert hall feeling more alive, emotions retooled, spirit lightened, range widened. Music is because. Why else would Beethoven compose 32 piano sonatas? What possible purpose of Haydn to write 62 of them? Because.Kissin is 41, which means he has left his child prodigy reputation far behind him and is now maybe midway through his career. I haven’t Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s something of a fashion at the moment for countertenors to break out of the baroque, to have a bit of a fling with classical and even romantic repertoire. David Daniels has experimented with Berlioz, Philippe Jaroussky has flirted as only a Frenchman can with the mélodies of Massenet and Hahn, and now Andreas Scholl is embracing his native lieder. A concert last night at the Wigmore Hall took his latest disc on the road, stripping the singer of the safety of the recording studio and letting his audience judge his latest, and in some ways most ambitious, programme for themselves.The Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach, Beethoven, Schubert Reiko Fujisawa (piano) (Quartz)Each of these three composers makes very specific, particular demands on a pianist’s technique. Playing Bach as sharply and as delicately as this doesn’t suggest that Reiko Fujisawa will be up to the mark when tackling the spongier, more amorphous world of Schubert’s Impromptus, but she’s able to inhabit both sound worlds with ease. Having a mixed programme on CD is such a rare pleasure; this is like listening to a carefully prepared live recital. The Schubert comes at the end of the disc. The major-minor shifts in the first Read more ...
Ismene Brown
What an era for pianists it was in the four decades from 1800 to 1840, the era covered by Murray Perahia’s recital last night. Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert and Chopin all in full verdant flight, selected for a programme of much fantasy and dancing rhythms, in which the translucent, crystalline playing of the American found and told multiple stories.Perahia’s narrative imagination constantly strikes me - it’s the way that he can play a pair of phrases with utmost simplicity, and yet unearth within them a sense of rich thoughts or feelings following each other, mirroring the imagination itself Read more ...