Schubert
David Nice
Restlessness in a good sense was the keynote of Elisabeth Leonskaja's latest revelatory recital. At 71, the Russian pianist, now an Austrian citizen, has all the supreme mastery it takes to make the volatility work: perfect weight and balance, miraculous rhythmic articulation, the right sense of space and freedom, and the ability to see where a line or a movement is going. Expect only the big, clear sound which is one of her trademarks - all-enveloping in the turbulent Capriccios of Brahms's Op. 116 set - and you can be startled by the kind of bounces and skips which made her Schubert a thing Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Aubade – Music by Fauré and Poulenc Västerås Sinfonietta/Howard Shelley (piano and conductor) (dB Productions)January blues? Those afflicted should self-medicate with this collection instead of nipping down to the nearest off-licence. Nothing cheers me up quite like an invigorating blast of Poulenc’s music. Which isn’t to imply that he’s all breezy insouciance. Skilled Poulencians know how to handle the darker corners. Howard Shelley understands exactly how this music should go, and he’s helped by joyous, alert playing from Sweden’s Västerås Sinfonietta. Poulenc’s sweet-natured Sinfonietta, a Read more ...
Natalie Clein
The cello is so deeply engrained in my fingers, my imagination, it’s part of my being – my life would feel amputated without it. You fall in love with the instrument, the music, and then you embark on the life-long task of trying to get closer to that beguiling musical ideal. That’s the drug, the contract you sign with the devil. Every day I think how lucky I am that I can dive into a score and work at it physically.In Cello Unwrapped, a year-long festival of the instrument at Kings Place which opens on Saturday 7 January with two performances by Alban Gerhardt, I’m performing in three Read more ...
David Nice
Has any living pianist had a richer or more charmed life than Idil Biret? As a child prodigy she studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and Alfred Cortot, and both there and in Germany with Wilhelm Kempff. At the age of four she was reproducing Bach Preludes and Fugues on the family piano in Ankara simply from hearing them on the radio. When she was seven the Turkish Parliament passed "Idil's Law", enabling not her but also other gifted children to study abroad.From the testimonies of her great mentors, it's clear she was always a happy child (pictured below with Turkish President İsmet İnönü Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Op. 90, Op. 101 and Op. 106 Steven Osborne (Hyperion)These three Beethoven sonatas are often thrown together as a trilogy; each work seems to lead into the next, the technical demands and scale increasing as they progress. Steven Osborne’s disc places the Hammerklavier first. And it’s phenomenally good; a big-boned, entertaining performance of a vast, unwieldy work, Osborne capturing the grandeur along with the passages of whimsical introspection. There’s a racy scherzo and a beautifully sustained slow movement. And what a finale: Beethoven’s peculiar slow Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Leonardo Leo: Sacred Works Ensemble &cetera/Ulrike Hofbauer (soprano and direction) (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi)Leonardo Leo lived and worked in Naples in the early 18th century, effectively running the city’s musical life alongside Francesco Durante after the death of Alessandro Scarlatti in 1725. He didn’t enjoy a long and successful career, dying relatively young after a botched skin operation. His music, at least on the basis of this anthology, deserves to be much better known. Much of why it sounds so attractive here is down to the quality of these performances. Soprano Ulrike Hofbauer Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
The Philharmonia’s Sunday concert wasn’t quite the event they’d planned. Christoph von Dohnányi scored a hit last season with Schubert's Ninth Symphony, so his reading of the Eighth seemed an ideal way to begin. But Dohnányi withdrew early on, leaving the work in the less inspiring hands of Josep Pons.The second half was devoted to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with the star pairing of Robert Dean Smith and Matthias Goerne. But Goerne too pulled out, and at very short notice. Fortunately, Catherine Wyn-Rogers proved a worthy stand-in, and Pons found his stride, making the second half more Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Medieval to Modern – Jeremy Denk’s Wigmore Hall recital took us on a whistle-stop tour of Western music, beginning with Machaut in the mid-14th century and ending with Ligeti at the end of the 20th. The programme was made up of 25 short works, each by a different composer and arranged in broadly chronological order, resulting in a series of startling contrasts, but punctuated with equally surprising, and often very revealing, continuities.Nothing in the first half, which spanned Machaut to Bach, was actually written for the piano, but Denk was unapologetic, applying a broad, and thoroughly Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
One of the many astonishing things in Mia Hansen-Løve’s fifth film is watching Isabelle Huppert hold back tears. In one scene they smear almost involuntarily down her face, in another she transforms them into a bark of nervous laughter. Huppert plays Nathalie Chazeaux, a sixty-something Paris philosophy teacher, who paces the film with almost frantic speed while her life unravels around her.Finally, when the immediate causes of her grief have passed, she surrenders to sobbing. It’s a beautifully delayed scene that catches the build-up of emotions (pictured below), her only company in her Read more ...
David Nice
More than just a great and serious pianist, Leif Ove Andsnes is a Mensch. His special gift in recent years has been to bring young musicians just establishing their careers together with star players like himself in beautiful and/or interesting places. I feel privileged to have heard him and his juniors in a programme of rare Sibelius melodramas in Bergen, Kurtág and Liszt in the main room of Grieg's humble home at Troldhaugen, and two shared recitals linked to the revelatory exhibition of little-known Norwegian artist Nikolai Astrup at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Now Andsnes has just curated a Read more ...
David Nice
All the best festivals develop organically, with a guiding hand from the best directors. When I first came to the East Neuk Festival two years ago, on its 10th anniversary, it was already a special case, thriving on the spirit of place and including an all-day Schubertiad from top international artists, many of whom were returning because they loved this special peninsula of the Fife coast so much. Since then a weekly "Retreat" for outstanding young artists guided by superlative coaches has started yielding unmissable special concerts, and beloved visitors have come for longer, three- or four Read more ...
David Nice
After a grey start, there was a spectacular sunset around midnight on the second of my two days in Reykjavik. It's what brings one of Iceland's most brilliant younger-generation talents, pianist Víkingur Ólafsson (and yes, he's worked with Björk), back to his homeland every June. He launched Reykjavík Midsummer Music in 2012, the first full year of programming at Olafur Eliasson's ever amazing Harpa concert halls and conference centre on the harbour. Clearly Ólafsson relishes working with distinguished friends, but he also happens to be a programme-maker of genius whose ideas work as well in Read more ...