Schubert
David Nice
Flashback to 1981, when the Bolshoy Ballet danced Swan Lake Act Two to a tinny Melodiya recording in Istanbul's Open-Air Theatre (seats were cheap for Interrailing students). Turkey was friends with the Soviet Union then. It hadn't been in the 1950s, when Turkish pianist and citoyenne du monde İdil Biret was advised not to play a Prokofiev sonata in her motherland. And it isn't friendly with Russia now, which didn't stop the first world-class Turkish symphony orchestra, the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic, playing an all-Russian programme featuring controversial 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Elasticity is a surprisingly reliable test for great art. How far can you stretch, bend, or reshape a work before it loses its essence, its identity? Hamlet, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Antigone, Pride and Prejudice can all take almost anything you can throw at them, but what about Winterreise, Schubert’s song-cycle of lost love?Katie Mitchell has dehumanised it in her staged interpretation, One Evening, Thomas Guthrie has explored the identity of the poet-lover in his puppet-driven version for New Kent Opera, David Alden has made a television film of it for Channel 4, and now director, Read more ...
David Nice
In the Wigmore's Lieder prayer meetings, baritone Christian Gerhaher is the high priest. There are good reasons for this, but given that the innermost circle of Wigmore Friends pack out his concerts, you do feel that the slightest criticism might merit lynching by the ecstatic communicants. His Schubert is never less than fascinating, but 2011's Winterreise kept its distance, while last night there were more question marks hovering over a Schubertiade of mostly semi-precious stones and only the odd jewel.Where is the unbroken line most of us first heard in his Wolfram at the Royal Opera Read more ...
David Nice
Cherrypicking from 17 concerts to come up with the one by last year's Leeds International Piano Competition winner may seem a bit unfair to the French Institute's ever more ambitious annual It's All About Piano! Festival. It was hard, for instance, to miss out on the youth element, the Satie bookending the weekend's events, or for that matter the absolute star of the festival two years ago, David Kadouch, who then gave one of the best, and most intriguingly programmed, recitals I've ever heard and teamed up for a Saturday night duo recital with Adam Laloum. Let's just say that the alternative Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
It’s always heartening to see a full house for a debut recital, though when expectations run so high, the stakes for the pianist can be dangerously raised. No worries at St John’s Smith Square, though, for Seong-Jin Cho. The diminutive, young South Korean musician who took the platform in front of a capacity crowd last night made waves last autumn upon winning the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw, and his first recording (on DG) likewise whetted appetites for his first visit to the Southbank Centre’s International Piano Series, which is currently being held at St John’s while the Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Louis Aubert: Sillages, Violin Sonata etc Jean-Pierre Armengard (piano), Alessandro Fagiuoli (violin), Olivier Chauzu (piano) (Grand Piano)Louis Aubert's piano work Sillages is ranked alongside Ravel's Gaspard in the sleeve notes to this disc, and one source places him among the greatest of French composers. It's impossible to judge on the basis of one 70-minute CD, but the four works by Aubert played here are exceptionally good and don't deserve to have slipped through the cracks. You suspect that bad luck is at the root of his neglect. Born in 1875, Aubert sang the “Pie Jesu” as a boy Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Schubert: Piano Music Steven Osborne (Hyperion)This is marvellous, an unexpected treat from a versatile pianist more commonly associated with 20th-century repertoire. Though Steven Osborne does have form in Schubert, having made a superb Hyperion disc of the composer's piano duet music several years ago. He gives us gloriously clear-sighted, lyrical performances of two posthumously published works. The D935 Four Impromptus are described in Misha Donat's notes as a sonata in disguise. Play them in order and you've an expansive 37-minute-long sequence, the last movement in the same key as Read more ...
David Nice
It was a massive but never overbearing three-parter, a three-and-a-half hour celebration, a mini-festival of youth and experience. Wouldn’t we all want to mark a major birthday in the company of friends of all ages? Elisabeth Leonskaja, much-loved torchbearer for the comprehensive manner of mentor and duo-partner Sviatoslav Richter, played with them all – members of the Doric Quartet, genius composer and most vivacious of clarinettists Jörg Widmann, Vienna Phil double-bass doyen Alois Posch and, most bracingly of all, three of her own acolytes making their very distinguished ways in the world Read more ...
David Nice
Not many people write conspicuously brilliant tweets, but Elizabeth Watts is someone who does. Working on the most demanding aria on her stunning new CD of operatic numbers and cantatas by the lesser-known of the two Scarlattis, father Alessandro rather than son Domenico, she tweeted: “Good news – I can sing 88 notes without a breath. Bad news – Scarlatti wrote 89.”The sheer hard work behind that achievement, which Watts discusses below, reminds one that the best singing isn’t something that’s just a gift. And when she went to the Royal College of Music as a postgrad student at the age Read more ...
David Nice
“People think when a person becomes old, he has to become serene,” declared that great pianist Claudio Arrau in his mid-seventies. “That’s absurd. The expressive intensity is, I feel, much stronger, much more concentrated in my playing than years ago.” You could argue the same for Stephen Kovacevich at his 75th birthday concert, though in the case of Schubert’s final, B flat Piano Sonata, was it entirely intensity that had him racing through a work that, back in 1982, he took about 10 minutes longer over, albeit with repeats?Without the promised BBC Radio 3 broadcast, pulled on Sunday, giving Read more ...
David Nice
“Whatever happened to Stephen Bishop?” is not a question likely to be asked by followers of legendary pianism. Born in San Pedro, Los Angeles on 17 October 1940, the young talent took his stepfather’s name as his career was launched at the age of 11. Later he honoured his own father’s Croatian "Kovacevich", by appending it to the “Bishop”. Now it’s plain Kovacevich carved in the pantheon of similar yet unique sensibilities like those of Arrau, Pollini, Richter and Zimerman, alongside masterly exponents of mostly different repertoire like Martha Argerich.On 2 November, in the hottest ticket on Read more ...
Peter Quantrill
This Barbican concert began with a Mendelssohn overture and ended with a Haydn symphony. But on stage were the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Ilan Volkov. What did you expect in between, a Mozart piano concerto? Not likely. Instead they gave the first performance of No.48 (night studio) by Richard Ayres. English-born but resident in the Netherlands and working mostly on the Continent, Ayres has impeccable post-Minimalist credentials (studies with Louis Andriessen and Morton Feldman) which do no more than hint at how his music behaves – like a kid in a well-stocked acoustic sweet-shop. Or at a Read more ...