piano
Igor Levit, Wigmore Hall review - every note of Brahms’ late genius carefully weighedSaturday, 20 January 2024
Successful performances, conductor Robin Ticciati once suggested to me, are when “the head has a conversation with the heart”. The same goes, surely, for great music, though from personal experience one has to reach a certain age to find that true... Read more... |
Boris Giltburg, Wigmore Hall review - epic heaven and hellTuesday, 09 January 2024
With rapid, sleight-of-hand flicks between calm assurance and demonic agitation, Boris Giltburg turned in a coherent and epic recital that won’t be surpassed in 2024. Most pianists would quake simply at the thought of performing the four Chopin... Read more... |
Mariam Batsashvili, Wigmore Hall review - spectacular pianism, with a sense of funWednesday, 13 December 2023
For a small nation, with a population not quite comparable to Scotland’s, Georgia has for long packed a mighty musical punch. Any visitor will know the soul-wrenching power of its choral polyphony, but a post-Soviet generation of classical soloists... Read more... |
Paul Lewis, Wigmore Hall review - Schubert sonatas revisitedWednesday, 06 December 2023
A decade has passed since Paul Lewis concluded an endeavour of a kind never previously undertaken: to perform, over two and a half years and across four continents, every work Schubert wrote for piano between 1822, the year he was diagnosed with... Read more... |
Grosvenor, SCO, Emelyanychev, Usher Hall, Edinburgh review - lightness of touch and a sprinkling of humourFriday, 24 November 2023
Nobody would describe Felix Mendelssohn as a fringe composer, but his piano concertos aren’t exactly central classical repertoire either. They lack the foundational status of Mozart’s and the high Romantic seriousness of Beethoven’s or Brahms’, and... Read more... |
Ben Folds, Royal Albert Hall review - piano pyrotechnics and modern musingsWednesday, 15 November 2023
When Ben Folds emerged in the mid-90s he was like Billy Joel’s snot-nosed little brother: another virtuoso pianist and songwriter but one whose style was sarcastic, subversive and a little bit punky.He has now mellowed into something of an elder... Read more... |
Hiromi's Sonicwonder, EFG London Jazz Festival, Barbican review - keyboard fireworks from a brilliantly versatile jazz pianistTuesday, 14 November 2023
To watch virtuoso jazz pianist Hiromi perform is to experience a vast weather system of sound; at some moments exuberant hailstorms of notes alternate with thunderous chords, at others, sombre atonal passages resolve into a burst of sunshine.By any... Read more... |
Lang Lang, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - playing with the musicTuesday, 31 October 2023
The showman was back – and, bless him, he can still sell every seat in a big hall even if the programme offers close on an hour and a half of unalloyed Bach.Lang Lang’s gifts are phenomenal: he doesn’t just play music brilliantly, every now and then... Read more... |
Lugansky, RPO, Petrenko, RFH review - so sure in all their waysMonday, 30 October 2023
It’s a given that no finer Rachmaninov interpreter exists than Nikolai Lugansky – a few others may see the works differently, not better – and that Vasily Petrenko has an uncanny affinity with both the swagger and the introspection of Elgar. But... Read more... |
Brahms Piano Sonatas, Elisabeth Leonskaja, Wigmore Hall review - when giants meetMonday, 18 September 2023
To master even one of Brahms’s three early sonatas is a colossal task for any pianist. To play them all with towering authority in a single concert takes a phenomenon. Elisabeth Leonskaja seems just that more than ever in her late 70s; not only is... Read more... |
Prom 6: Hough, BBC Philharmonic, Mark Wigglesworth review - poetry and powerWednesday, 19 July 2023
This Prom by the BBC Philharmonic was billed as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Royal Northern College of Music, in distant Manchester.By design or lucky accident, the RNCM was well represented, with a new work by recent graduate Grace-... Read more... |
Fiona Maddocks: Goodbye Russia - Rachmaninoff in Exile review - an affectionate biographical portraitWednesday, 28 June 2023
In 1917, in the face of the Bolshevik revolution closing in on his country estate, Rachmaninoff fled Russia, never to return. He was 44, at his peak as composer, pianist and conductor, but spent the rest of his life in exile in the US and... Read more... |
