Wigmore Hall
John Gilhooly
It is hard to believe that it’s really happening! Despite a few bumps along the way, Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber, one of the greatest Lieder duos of our time, will open the 20/21 Wigmore Hall Season tomorrow night in a programme of Schubert and Berg. This is the first of 100 concerts between now and Christmas.It has taken a huge amount of work to get to this point and undoubtedly there will be many more challenges ahead as we navigate our way through the winter months. We have reached this point because of our generous audiences and their support over so many years. The only way that Read more ...
David Nice
If it all comes across as vividly as this on screen, imagine what it would have been like to witness in person. Which quite a few of us very nearly did, until we had to be disinvited owing to changed government guidelines. Hopefully the move back to reopening of concert halls will admit us in limited numbers to the Wigmore Hall in September, and what a feast it is from this pioneering set-up: 100 events planned up to 22 December, all to be livestreamed (the qualification being that they really ought to charge a small amount for viewing; everything for free makes it hard on smaller outfits Read more ...
Steven Isserlis
So Ida has left us – a legend has departed. What a violinist! What a woman! Magnificent, unique, incorrigible – she was a law unto herself.First, the playing: a film about her was aptly entitled: “I AM the Violin.” And she was! The violin was her life; she mastered it, devoted so much of her existence to it, cared so much about it. Every performance was an event, which she took absolutely seriously, giving each concert her all. She spoke through her violin, proved herself through it, lived within the music she made. She was a marvel, an icon; each note she played was the result of total Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Of course, we just had to end with a midsummer Winterreise. The Wigmore Hall’s month of lockdown concerts for BBC Radio 3 had begun with a legendary elegy – the Chaconne from Bach’s D minor Partita, written according to musical folklore in memory of his first wife, with which Stephen Hough so gravely, beautifully, broke the pandemic silence on 1 June. It finished, perhaps inevitably, with Schubert’s farewell journey of a forsaken spirit through storm, ice and snow, while the sun blazed down outside over a fretful, still fearful city. But art, even on the level that Mark Padmore and Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
Last Tuesday’s offering from the Wigmore Hall’s series of live broadcasts was a fiery recital from Russian violinist Alina Ibragimova partnered by pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout. Beginning with Schubert’s Violin Sonata "Sonatina" in A minor, Bezuidenhout’s opening bars had a restrained urgency, giving just a hint at the passionate flourish Ibragimova was to provide as she entered. Dialogue between violinist and pianist was intense, as they moved very much as one unit through the movement towards a rounded end.The second, Andante movement opened with a serene poise with some Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
Loneliness haunts the solo song – not simply all those solitary wanderers and defiant wayfarers of the Lied tradition, but the forsaken lovers and questing pilgrims who fill the folk-song repertoire of many lands. So, amid the general poignancy of the Wigmore Hall’s lockdown concerts for Radio 3, the vocal performances have carried a special frisson. Warmly communicative voices have projected their anguish over, or resignation to, solitude into ranks of seats empty save for one or two engineers and announcers. This week, both soprano Ailish Tynan (accompanied by pianist Iain Burnside, on Read more ...
Miranda Heggie
I'm not sure if it was the beauty of Roderick Williams’s velvety vocals, the poignant delight of seeing a live performance in a concert hall after all this time, or my generally unusual frame of mind during lockdown that caused me to immediately burst into tears at the opening bars of Schubert’s "Gretchen am spinnrade" ("Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel"), but the fact no other audience members were around to witness my impromptu blubbering was certainly one plus point to watching Williams and pianist Joseph Middleton’s Wigmore Hall recital at home on my laptop. Having listened to most of the Read more ...
Jessica Duchen
The Wigmore Hall’s triumphant series of lockdown lunchtime concerts by the finest of local recitalists is not without an audience; it’s just that the performers can’t see them. Conversely, online viewers can watch the artists closely enough to see what fingering pianists choose for the awkward passages, and the sound quality is remarkably fine - though may also depend on your computer or smartphone (I heard Steven Isserlis’s recital the other day on my phone from the middle of Richmond Park). It’s welcome, as it’s all we have at present, but I, for one, refuse to accept that bone-chilling Read more ...
Richard Bratby
After a devastating drought, even a light shower can feel like something of a miracle. Under normal circumstances, a 60 minute lunchtime piano recital from the Wigmore Hall would represent wholly unremarkable business as usual for BBC Radio 3. As it was – coming (as the presenter Andrew McGregor reminded us) eleven weeks after the Wigmore had last heard live music – this felt like an event of profound significance. Perhaps that’s no bad thing. Perhaps we haven’t always listened to artists as life-affirming as Stephen Hough, and music as great as his opening programme of Bach and Schumann, as Read more ...
David Nice
At last, it seems, one venerable British institution will be emulating what Scandinavian and Czech set-ups have been managing over the past month: live performances from an audience-less venue, though in sound only. In quickly reorganised scheduling along with BBC Radio 3, the Wigmore Hall features a host of its top regular artists in June lunchtime concerts.We’ll be announcing those nearer the time, and reviewing more than a few In the meantime, you can get the vision as well in films from the Wigmore’s splendid archive, with an incredible wealth of material available on its YouTube channel Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Six weeks ago, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation announced that it the winner of its prestigious and extremely valuable main annual prize for 2020 "to a composer, performer, or scholar who has made outstanding contributions to the world of music" will be the viola player Tabea Zimmermann. She commented to an interviewer that what mattered to her most was neither well-paid concert appearances nor playing in large halls, but rather to be involved in things that are interesting for what she called their "Inhalt". The German language is blessed with words that have a whole field of Read more ...
David Nice
"All true spiritual art has always been RADICAL art": thus spake the oracular Georges Lentz, composer of the pitch-black odyssey for electric guitar that took everyone by surprise last night. In that vein, why not add that all the greatest performers always push the boundaries, and that 28-year-old Sean Shibe, though included by the sponsors of this concert among "emerging talent", is already in their select company. This amazing Wigmore concert took us from a first half of fragrant miniatures by David Fennessy and minimal magic from Sofia Gubaidulina elided into radical Bach to the " Read more ...