piano
Glyn Môn Hughes
The knots on the purse-strings have certainly been untied at the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and it was good to hear another world première in less than a week. This time it was the turn of Michael Torke, the composer of Ecstatic Orange and Yellow Pages and a prolific composer of much else besides. But why this piece? There’s a bit of a connection with “Strawberry Fields Forever”, that iconic Beatles single, and his piece Tahiti was released on CD and recorded by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s contemporary music outfit Ensemble 10/10.The new Concerto for Orchestra was a single- Read more ...
David Nice
Most pianists never truly master one of Brahms’s two piano concertos, those colossal symphonies for soloist and orchestra, let alone both. To present the two in one concert, then, seems foolhardy – and apparently was when András Schiff went for the marathon at the Edinburgh Festival during the Brian McMaster era. No-one expected anything but true majesty, though, when Elisabeth Leonskaja asked to do the same. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra duly obliged, taking up her suggestion of Okko Kamu, a Finnish master I haven’t seen for decades, as conductor. The result was almost off the Richter scale Read more ...
David Nice
You know what to expect from a standard programme of masterpieces like this, led by two great performers in careful control of their repertoire, and those expectations are never going to be disappointed. You’re not going to hear the kind of new-sound Brahms side by side with the more recent end of the German musical tradition – Zimmermann, say, or Henze; that’s the provenance of a fresh thinker like Vladimir Jurowski. But while last night’s kind of old-style concert format may not be with us for ever, we might as well treasure it while it lasts from the likes of Mitsuko Uchida, a pianist who Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Arcadi Volodos is a relatively rare visitor to London these days. Although the Russian pianist, 42, rose early to fame, his development has perhaps taken him in a direction that startles those who were initially seduced by the astounding virtuoso transcriptions – many of them his own – in which he initially established his reputation.Anyone hoping for a taste of those at his Royal Festival Hall recital last night had to wait until his third encore. This programme had a very different focus, one that could scarcely have been more intimate and pure-hearted: an early Schubert sonata, Brahms’s Read more ...
Ismene Brown
What a day for piano-lovers and Beethoven-lovers – Elisabeth Leonskaja for lunch, Maria João Pires for supper. Beethoven from both, stupendous playing from both, all in all generating a general sense of disbelief in this member of the audience. I mean, really! The Wigmore Hall is the epicure’s choice for music, but even by Wiggie standards this was beyond expectations.Still more, these two grand pianists were bringing Beethoven the virtuoso pianist himself to life, turning from a display of his dynamic improvisation powers to his instinctive pleasure in the more rule-based working-out of Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Pianist Mitsuko Uchida's concentration, calm and grace under pressure are an inspiration. Towards the end of the first piece on her programme, played to a packed Royal Festival Hall last night, the quiet but insistent high-pitched screech of a fire alarm kept going off. Low voices on walkie-talkies at the entrances to the hall were also audible. Whatever the confusion they were sharing with each other, they were failing to lift it. While the noises persisted, Uchida continued the delicate hand-crossing dialogues of Schubert's F Minor Impromptu from the D935 set. She would quizzically hover a Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
Daniil Trifonov, 23, has shot to prominence as one of the hottest pianistic properties of the moment. With multiple competition wins behind him, including the Tchaikovsky in his native Russia, plus a recording contract with DG and a frenetic globe-trotting schedule, he is now a very busy young man. Last night’s London appearance was his recital debut at the Royal Festival Hall, a venue only accorded to the biggest names in the Southbank Centre’s International Piano Series, the new season of which he was opening.A sizable though not quite capacity crowd of pianophiles largely took this young Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
No man is a prophet in his own land – except possibly the Macedonian pianist Simon Trpčeski. In the UK he shot to fame upon winning the London International Piano Competition in 2001 and at home he has become a national hero, his efforts rebooting the country’s classical music scene and inspiring the building of a new full-scale concert hall in Skopje – even though he is still a mere 35. He is also celebrated there as a popular songwriter. That, though, is a strand he left outside the Wigmore Hall, offering a programme that contained as much dark introspection as it did extroversion.Putting Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
The Dream has at its heart a great partnership. Not just the original, magical pairing of Anthony Dowell and Antoinette Sibley, for whom Frederick Ashton created the ballet fifty years ago (thereby launching one of the top couples in ballet history), but the partnership of Titania and Oberon themselves. Regal, fickle, fast, flighty, and dangerous, these two are equals as lovers and as rulers: it is their quarrel that starts the story and their smouldering reunion that brings it to a happy conclusion.So you need two good principals for a really perfect Dream – ideally with more than a hint of Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
It's something of a cliche to regard concert pianists as mad geniuses or nutty professors, and John Ogdon fitted the formula only too well. Born in Nottinghamshire in 1937, he displayed absurdly precocious musical brilliance as a child, and in due course became one of the highest-flying students at the Royal Northern College of Music. When he won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1962 (he came equal first with Vladimir Ashkenazy), a star was born and his international career lifted off instantly.With his science-fiction hair, brainiac beard and heavy-framed glasses, Ogdon Read more ...
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 ...
David Nice
Am I alone in a readiness to sacrifice all four Rachmaninov piano concertos – though maybe not the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini – in favour of the second sets of Preludes and Études-Tableaux? Probably not, after last night, when Nikolay Lugansky unfurled the 13 Op. 32 Preludes as one discombobulating symphonic cosmos. This is probably as close as we can come today to being in the presence of Rachmaninov himself, the greatest recorded pianist I know.Some find Lugansky cold. Let’s just say that he favours Apollonian control and poise over Dionysian abandon, though not always. And if Apollo Read more ...