Wigmore Hall
David Nice
A double-sided A4 sheet is better than a programme online only – the default for several London venues now – but the Wigmore Hall missed a vital trick in failing to tell us what Boris Giltburg intended in a transcendental sequence which should have been headed “death and remembrance”, He’s an eloquent writer, too; his own note would have been much better than the disconnected observations we got about Bach/Busoni, Ravel, Chopin and Medtner.No matter: the unity in variety was both stunning and perfectly placed in a recital of two equally compelling but very different halves. Everything, Read more ...
David Nice
Epic-lyric magician Brahms wears a very adaptable garment for certain masterpieces: black on the outside with fur trimming, reversible to show its exquisitely wrought, variegated silk patterns on the inside.For the celebrated G minor Piano Quartet and the First Piano Concerto – which Elisabeth Leonskaja has featured so impressively in concert with its successor – the darkness predominates, but the colours flash too. In the Second Concerto and Quartet, the bright reverse takes the lead. There can surely be no team more adaptable to all the miracles than Leonskaja and members of the Read more ...
Gavin Dixon
Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov concluded their three-concert survey of Beethoven’s violin sonatas on the warmest day of the year. But the Wigmore Hall is always comfortable, and the temperature was well under control. The heat deterred the audience, but those who did attend made up with their impressive enthusiasm, unusual even for the ever-engaged Wigmore regulars.The performance was given on period instruments, still more the exception than the rule for Beethoven chamber music. For the first half, the Sonatas Nos. 4 and 5, Melnikov played a fortepiano appropriate to the era, 1800–01 Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Wigmore Soloists is such a good idea, and still at an early stage of its development. The group brings together top players to perform the wider chamber music repertoire, normally septets and upwards. The hall also gives the players a place they can call their home, plus a sprinkling of Wigmore branding to help them make their way in the world.There have been inevitable delays. Firm plans to set up Wigmore Soloists were already fully made and in place in 2019, but the pandemic and resulting backlogs of postponed concerts have meant that the group is, in reality, only just starting to be Read more ...
David Nice
Three Beethoven quartets, early, middle and late, in a single evening – inevitably as part of a cycle, like the Jerusalems’ Wigmore Hall triptych last night – is demanding on the audience, supremely tough on the players.We could have left this concert enriched and on a high at the half-way mark, open-mouthed at the brilliance of the tumultuous fugal finale in the third “Razumovsky” Quartet, Op. 59 No. 3 in C. Never was an interval needed more before the four players returned to the awesome challenge of the great, seven-movement C shap minor Quartet Op. 131 (one of Beethoven's sketches Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
The four years of Angela Hewitt’s globe-trotting “Bach Odyssey” confirmed time and again that she brings a nonpareil artistry and authority to the most demanding, and rewarding, of all keyboard repertoires. Yet the Canadian pianist, as we already knew, carries plenty of other arrows in her musical quiver. At the Wigmore Hall on Saturday, her mixed programme blended some choice Bach – four selections from the Well-Tempered Clavier’s second book – with a brace of Mozart sonatas, along with works by Ravel and Chabrier. Her recordings of the latter pair’s solo piano pieces emphatically prove her Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The main course of this Wigmore lunchtime concert was Brahms but I was lured in by the dessert: a rare chance in this country to hear the music of the French composer Guillaume Connesson. Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski and his international group also treated us to a newish piece by another Macedonian, Pande Shahov, in a nicely-proportioned programme that started with high seriousness and ended with a fluffy-light soufflé.Sadly I was unable to be there in person, but caught the stream on the Wigmore’s website – their streaming of concerts that began during Covid seems to have become a Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
“It mustn’t be a surface thing. You have to put in the work,” Janet Baker once said. Sandrine Piau’s Wigmore recital of German song followed by French song was the perfect demonstration of that credo in action.Whereas Piau described the repertoire, almost nonchalantly before performing their encore – Debussy’s “Beau Soir” – as a “new programme from David Kadouch”, there was no disguising the level of careful preparation and forethought which both singer and pianist had put into every nuance. The poetry and the music could be savoured and enjoyed completely; the results were overwhelmingly Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
It had been a tense week, explained Jonathan Sells, the artistic director and bass-baritone of Solomon’s Knot, from the stage of the Wigmore Hall: unsure if the concert would go ahead, unsure who exactly would be able to perform, unsure if there would be anyone in the audience.In the event it did go ahead, there was an audience present (although I was watching the livestream) and the hastily revised cast cramming the stage gave a joyful and uplifting account of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio that was a triumph in the circumstances.Solomon’s Knot’s credo is “to blow the dust off early music” and “ Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
This winter's evening spent at Wigmore Hall, completely immersed in performances of songs by Tchaikovsky, was a delight.Mezzo-soprano Ekaterina Semenchuk and pianist Semyon Skigin know these songs profoundly well. They described the proposal thus: “From [Tchaikovsky’s] 104 songs we have chosen 24, focusing on the widest possible range, from joyful exultation to the depths of pain and melancholy.” The words of these great songs might speak of hesitancy and mistakes and regret, but the melodies just flow.Semenchuk is one of the great mezzos of our time. She has performed no fewer than 30 roles Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
On a night when any brooks running past the Wigmore Hall might have frozen almost solid, Imogen Cooper’s recital travelled on sparkling waters of the highest purity across almost a century of pianistic innovation.As well as the streams and fountains that both Liszt and Ravel descriptively channelled into their Jeux d’eaux, Dame Imogen (absurdly, she has only just acquired the handle) found a rippling liquidity even amid the monumental gravity of Schubert’s great A minor sonata. Piano generations touched hands, too, in Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales of 1911. They carried the Viennese Read more ...
David Nice
Comparisons might have been odious between three of the world's most cultured players – pianist Jitka Cechová, violinist Jan Talich and cellist Jan Páleníček of the Smetana Trio – and the young, British-based Minerva Piano Trio (Annie Yim, Michal Ćwiżewicz and Richard Birchall).Not a bit of it. Quotients of sheer joy were high in both the Wigmore Hall Sunday morning programme and the launch of a concert series in classy Christ Church Kensington, but if anything even higher in the Minerva’s double bill by virtue of an extraordinary, heart-overflowing masterpiece, Schumann’s Second Read more ...