Wigmore Hall
David Nice
Before his slightly over-extended majesty drops behind a cloud at the end of this bicentenary year, and following Louis Lortie’s light-and-shade monodrama on Sunday, Franz Liszt has moved back to left-of-centre in two ambitious midweek concerts. In the second instalment of Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s rather drily named “Liszt Project” last night, the composer became a kind of black hole absorbing even adventurous successors; but I suspect his dance-of-death side would have disposed him even more favourably to the crazy ambition of Khatia Buniatishvili’s half-elegiac programming the night before. Read more ...
David Nice
It was Chopin time when I last heard Louis Lortie, and a typical London clash of scheduling allowed me to catch his effervescent Op 10 Études before pedalling like crazy north of the river for the second half of Elisabeth Leonskaja’s even bigger all-Chopin programme. Last night Lortie offered a comparably monumental homage to this year's bicentenary birthday boy Liszt in all his Italian-inspired variety, and there was no need to miss, or to wish to miss, a note. It still didn’t convert me to the idea that Liszt, like Chopin in 2010, has more to him than first meets the ear, but it was Read more ...
David Nice
How good it feels, after several decades of Shostakovich quartet series, to be able to say not just “what a tragic life” but also “what ingenious treatment of great ideas, what a range of universal human emotions”. And even, walking on air away from the second concert in the Pacifica Quartet’s Wigmore Shostakovich cycle, “how accepting, how at one with the world”.That light-serious aspect to Shostakovich’s music has usually been a bit booted aside, often by the composer himself. Knowing that Russian quartets like the legendary Borodins understood from personal experience something of what Read more ...
David Nice
Some great singers know how to modulate their beautiful instruments for long vocal life; others push technique and expression to the limits in countless concerts of a lifetime before burnout. Baritone Christian Gerhaher, it seems, belongs to the beautiful and the secure. I'm glad to have heard his Winterreise, a far from lonely journey given the partnership of pianist Gerold Huber, but it always felt like a songbook entrusted to a calm exponent of truth and wisdom rather than the first-person narration of Schubert's heartbroken winter wanderer.It all depends what you want from the richest of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
The queues weren't quite Proms-sized but they were long enough for the little old Wigmore Hall to seem more than a little overwhelmed. Expectations were immense. The past year has seen baritone Christian Gerhaher cast a singular spell over London audience, through his introduction of a touch of intense Lieder-style intimacy to the orchestral and operatic stages. No wonder then that there was such a palpable buzz as we awaited his appearance in his natural Lieder habitat for a performance of Die schöne Müllerin at the Wigmore Hall.The usual arc of this poignantly personal tale of unrequited Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It may have taken her until 2005 to get her Wigmore Hall debut, until 2006 to break onto the stage of the Royal Opera House, but at 53 Susan Bullock has finally arrived, claiming the crown of soloist for this year’s Last Night of the Proms, a firm foothold at Covent Garden and her rightful place as Britain’s finest dramatic soprano. For a singer who “started singing by mistake”, whose musical training began in a council house in Cheshire on a piano rescued from the local rubbish dump, it’s no small achievement.Chance and luck have played their role in the careers of many performing artists ( Read more ...
David Nice
Profound experience of 2010? For me, unquestionably, portions of the great Russian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja's first-time journey through all the Schubert sonatas at the Verbier Festival. I was lucky to catch three out of nine recitals, and to talk to her about Schubert. I'd have been happy to listen again to any of those extraordinary works - all 19 are loveably idiosyncratic - in London. But this was a strand of unusual radiance I hadn't caught at Verbier embracing, as ever, Schubert's deepest sorrow in a late piece served up as prelude, the meltingly beautiful A-major Sonata D664 and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
The two-course evening out is made possible by the Wigmore Hall’s late Friday-night concerts, so if you get out of a central-London show - or dinner - by, say, 9.30, you can add a second layer of entertainment at 10. In my case, a ferociously poor hour spent at contemporary dance in Sadler’s Wells was offset by an hour with Joanna MacGregor in a stimulating splicing of Bach and Shostakovich piano music that at least offered something to think about, if not ultimate satisfaction. Evening not entirely wasted, then.MacGregor is worth following for her communication skills, more than Read more ...
David Nice
Ghosts legendary and personal dog the nostalgic footsteps of Elgar's utterly characteristic late Piano Quintet - though who knew the old man had as much red blood in him as last night's world-class team managed to squeeze out? And circumstantial ghosts have often niggled during the little portion of the Wigmore Hall's century-and-a-decade history I've witnessed, namely the spectre of sweltering at the back behind rows of nodding heads seemingly as old as the hall itself. But there are also the noble spirits of great performances, and heaven knows this sedate old venue has seen a few of those Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
The Wigmore Hall was full to capacity last night, its crowd gathered to pay homage to a great musician at the end of his career, and to discover the talents of a great musician at the very beginning of his. While Alfred Deller might have been the pioneer, breaking ground and awakening audiences to new possibilities, it was in the hands of James Bowman that the countertenor voice was revealed as more than an oddity or novelty, a thing of uniquely expressive and vulnerable beauty. Sharing his farewell recital with young Iranian harpsichordist Mahan Esfahani, Bowman offered us an evening which Read more ...
Ismene Brown
How important is it to hear “the composer’s intentions” at a concert? Maybe only the interpreter’s intentions are possible. The young Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov challenges the golden rule of faithfulness to source with the resources of today’s piano - not the ropey old Soviet thing Shostakovich would have had, or the limited piano Schubert would have known, and last night at the Wigmore Hall delivered an ear-opener of a recital all about modern pianism at its most fascinating and provocative.Melnikov’s award-winning recording of Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues was the peg on which Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Paul Lewis doesn't smile much. He came to the keyboard last night with his face tuned to his usual blank-to-grim setting for the first recital in his Schubert cycle at the Wigmore Hall: a serious man with serious business. If only I could take his piano playing as seriously as he clearly thinks we should.As the British torch bearer to the sacred Austro-German school of pianism, as a protégé of the great Alfred Brendel, as a widely garlanded critical phenomenon, Lewis shouldn't be hard to admire. Yet his stiff musical posturing and disavowal of any short-term pleasures - colour, texture, Read more ...