Schubert
Graham Rickson
Reynaldo Hahn: Piano Quartet, Piano Quintet, Songs Karim Sulayman (tenor), Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective (Chandos)I’ve been a fan of the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective for some time, having heard them in concert and on their excellent previous albums, which often seek out under-recorded composers and give them the spotlight: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Fanny Mendelssohn, Alma Mahler, Luise Adolphe le Beau. This album is another example of that, comprising chamber and vocal pieces by Reynaldo Hahn (1874-1947), not someone whose music I was previously familiar with. From being a darling Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Brahms: Piano Sonata No. 1, Schubert: Wanderer Fantasy Alexandre Kantorow (piano) (BIS)I’d previously encountered pianist Alexandre Kantorow via his exuberant set of Saint-Saëns piano concertos, sparky, lovable performances conducted by his father Jean-Jacques. This solo disc contains weightier repertoire but the Kantorow’s elucidatory abilities prevent things ever getting oppressive; if there’s a more accessible reading of Brahms’s Op. 1 Piano Sonata on disc, I’ve not heard it. Questions of technique don’t arise here, and unless you follow with a score it’s easy to forget how Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Schubert: Sonata in G major D. 894, Moments Musicaux D. 780, Fantasy in F minor D. 940 Maurizio Pollini, Daniele Pollini (pianos) (Deutsche Grammophon)What a superb cover image for the last recording by Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024). Pollini ‘père’ is seated at the piano, backlit. His son Daniele (b.1978) stands behind him, looking over his shoulder. Cosimo Filippini’s photograph tells the story of this album so well. Pollini is in the role of the authoritative guide, as if teaching his son – and us listeners – lessons about this music. I can somehow imagine him repeating Paul Read more ...
David Nice
Wonders never ceased in Elisabeth Leonskaja’s return to the Wigmore Hall. Not only did she play Schubert’s last three sonatas with all repeats and the full range of a unique power undiminished in a 78-year old alongside a never too overstated pathos, radiance and delicacy; just before receiving the Wigmore Hall Medal (presentation by John Gilhooly pictured below), she also gave us more revelations in the compressed world of Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces, Op. 19.Only this pianist could possibly follow Pavel Kolesnikov's revelatory take on Schubert's crowning glory, the B flat Sonata D960 the Read more ...
David Nice
All five finalists in the Leeds International Piano Competition, at which Pavel Kolesnikov was one of the jurors, should have been given tickets, transport and accommodation to hear his Wigmore recital the evening after the prizegiving. Not that supreme imagination can be taught, but to witness the degree of physical ease (and freeflowing concert wear) that allows all the miracles to happen would be a good lesson to so many tension-racked pianists, including some of Kolesnikov’s peers.As always, the connections he made in his programme were surprising, though obvious once you thought about it Read more ...
Simon Thompson
When you stop to think about it, Schwanengesang is a pretty ridiculous thing. Schubert’s final song cycle was famously put together by his publishers after his death, and so it’s barely a cycle at all. Therefore, unlike Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, there’s no story and, even worse, the lurches in mood between the songs are so extreme that they can become absurd.I reflected on that several times while watching Ian Bostridge singing it during this EIF Queen’s Hall recital, because his identification with the songs and their meaning seemed so complete that he could drag the audience into Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Founded by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra first performed at the Proms – to a rapturous welcome – in 2003. For two decades the visits, and the audience rapture, have continued, while the region of most WEDO players’ birth now looks, this hideous year above all, more steeped in blood and hate than ever. Said and Barenboim never intended the orchestra, with its core element of young Arab and Israeli musicians later augmented by players from neighbouring lands, as some kind of soppily high-minded peace project. Rather, they sought a way of creatively Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
“Death doesn’t scare me at all,” said my friend Christopher Hitchens during our last telephone conversation. “After all, it’s the only certainty in life. Dying, however, scares me shitless”.However hard one tries to remove these three final sonatas from the narrative of Franz Schubert’s life and imminent death from syphilis when he wrote them, this is inescapably what they are about: fear not of one’s own obliteration, but the process of getting there. But also insolent defiance of obliteration, and validation of life lived.Paul Lewis’s recordings of these sonatas, and live renderings during Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Like Hamlet or Fidelio, Schubert’s Winterreise can withstand and overcome (almost) any kind of re-imagining. In the case of Hans Zender’s 1993 “composed interpretation” of the work for chamber orchestra – and sundry sound effects – the new model has itself become a near-canonical classic. Allan Clayton first brought his large, lustrous but vulnerable and involving tenor to the re-orchestrated song cycle in 2015. At the Queen Elizabeth Hall last night, Jane Mitchell’s production (with Clayton billed as co-director) confirmed that Zender’s music, and the panoply of stage effects that Read more ...
Graham Rickson
LICHT: 800 Years of German Lieder Anna Lucia Richter (mezzo-soprano), Ammiel Bushakevitz (hurdy gurdy, harpsichord, clavichord, fortepiano, piano) (SWR2/Challenge Classics)LICHT, 800 Years of German Lieder, from Anna Lucia Richter and Ammiel Bushakevitz does exactly what it says on the tin. Chronologically, the album’s eclectic programme takes us all the way from early 11th century Gregorian chant (it’s actually the final track, to make the story “run full circle”) to a song by Wolfgang Rihm published as recently as 2008. And on the way, it stops off to pay visits to (...wait for it Read more ...
Ed Vulliamy
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 syphilis – ergo, knew he was dying – and his death in 1828.It was quite an odyssey for those of us who followed those concerts (in my case, across two of those continents), and apparently for Lewis too, as he revisits selections from that programme, adding other, earlier, Schubert sonatas for a scaled-down version of those tours, this time across Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos 1-4, Paganini Rhapsody Lukáš Vondráček, Prague Symphony Orchestra/Tomáš Brauner (Supraphon)Yuja Wang, Los Angeles Philharmonic/Gustavo Dudamel (DG)Yet more Rachmaninov, but I’m not complaining, and comparing pianists Lukáš Vondráček and Yuja Wang in the composer’s five concertante works has been an enjoyable experience. Vondráček’s set was recorded between February and June 2021 in pandemic conditions, whereas Wang’s cycle was taped live over two weekends in February 2023. Vondráček favours broader tempi and plenty of introspection in Concertos 2 and 3, Read more ...