Chopin
David Nice
A voluptuous dream in sequined silver, the nearly-27-year-old Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili sat down at the keyboard and instantly transcendentalised her mermaid look as Ravel’s Ondine. Even Brahms took to the life aquatic of her recital’s first half. For the second, though, there should have been a costume change into a clown suit with a tatty tutu pulled over it. Never have I witnessed a crazier trip through the distorting mirror – and if even Stravinsky’s mad puppet Petrushka couldn’t take the relentless onslaught, what about the poor old Chopin Second Scherzo and the Ravel La Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
This concert brought to a close the London Symphony Orchestra's focus on Scriabin, in a series appropriately titled "Music in colour". The Third Symphony was partnered here with Messiaen’s early work Les offrandes oubliées and Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto – both in their own way richly colouristic works. Though the LSO never puts half-baked goods on stage, it is fair to say that, having just returned from a European tour which included three performances of this programme, the result was even more polished than usual – especially considering Scriabin is hardly core repertoire these days. Read more ...
David Nice
This is more an excuse for celebration than a review. Six years after the Scottish Chamber Orchestra was founded in 1974 – the birth year we were marking last night – I rolled up in a foggy Edinburgh one February day and chose it as my alma mater on the strength especially of one concert which showed what musical life in the city might be like: trumpeter John Wilbraham playing Bach and Handel with the SCO under Roderick Brydon. I fell in love with the venue, the Queen’s Hall, as much as the orchestra. In 1982 I proudly took on the role of the SCO’s student publicity officer. It’s a Read more ...
David Nice
Three great pianists, one of the world’s top clarinettists and two fine string players in a single concert: it’s what you might expect from a chamber music festival at the highest level. What I wasn’t anticipating on the first evening in Stavanger was to move from the wonderful cathedral to an old labour club up the hill, now a student venue with two halls, for a late-night cabaret and hear five more remarkable performers.Such is the free and easy way you come across top quality in unexpected formations at Stavanger. A lot of it has to do with the boundary-pushing of the clarinettist in Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Had we but world enough and time... A new book by the editor of the Guardian makes it clear quite how many hours in the day it takes to run a national newspaper in the digital age. There is the unyielding nature of 24-hour news, while the internet relentlessly asks grave questions of print media’s business model. Some editors respond to the job's demands by keeping obsessively fit, and then there is Rusbridger’s alternative guide to stress-busting: the piano.Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible, written in diary form, is the story of Rusbridger’s attempt to grapple with Chopin’s Read more ...
David Nice
It was the kind of programme that great pianist Vladimir Horowitz used to pioneer, with the simple balm of Scarlatti offset by Scriabin’s flights of fancy, and a dash of virtuoso fireworks to conclude. Though he is an admirer of the master, and even featured Horowitz’s hyperintensification of an already extravagant Liszt transcription in this recital, Yevgeny Sudbin is very much his own man: a thinker verging on the visionary who always seems to know exactly where the more extreme fantasists among his chosen composers are heading.What a good idea to make a centred start with pensive Scarlatti Read more ...
Kimon Daltas
Benjamin Grosvenor made his Southbank recital debut last night in a sold-out Queen Elizabeth Hall in another milestone in his unstoppable evolution from wunderkind to fully-fledged concert star. It has been a good year for the 20-year-old pianist, during which he added a Classic Brit and two Gramophone awards to a Critics’ Circle accolade, Decca recording contract and tenure on the Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme.Back in 2004, when he won the piano section of the Young Musician of the Year at the age of 12 (losing out to a 16-year-old Nicola Benedetti in the final), his preternatural 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 ...
geoff brown
Their bicentennial years may have been and gone, but even Mazeppa’s wild horse wouldn’t be able to stop the world’s top pianists playing Chopin and Liszt almost every month. Last night Maurizio Pollini and his aristocratic art returned to the Royal Festival Hall for a recital featuring both composers, each on either side of the interval. Pollini also brought his Steinway-Fabbrini touring piano – a Steinway from the Hamburg factory, titivated inside with extra refinements by the piano technician Angelo Fabbrini. People clustered round it in the interval snapping photos, as if they’d spotted a Read more ...
geoff brown
For more than 10 years now I have been waiting in vain for the pianist Evgeny Kissin to shatter the stereotyped image built around him by music critics who haven’t always liked what they’ve heard. You know the kind of thing: Kissin the visitor from outer space, the strange performer who bows to the audience like a priest at a religious rite, displays plenty of peerless technique, but after decades cocooned and fêted on the virtuoso circuit appears too often emotionally remote, as if his feelings had been locked in his dressing-room fridge or maybe a strongbox in Siberia.I recognise much of Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
You couldn't imagine a less likely acrobat than avuncular American Richard Goode. But when it comes to the piano, there's no mistaking it. A nippy little tumbler he undoubtedly is. Today we saw his fingers bounce about the keyboard like a troupe of prepubescent Romanian gymnasts. The sleepy Sunday concert that many had clearly hoped for was not going to be the narrative of this kinetic performance.The first work on the programme might have lulled some into a false sense of security. Schumann's Kinderszenen called mostly on Goode's avuncularism. He responded with some tender pianistic sketches Read more ...
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 ...