Wigmore Hall
The Art of Fugue, Schiff, Nosrati, Wigmore Hall review - rarity and quality in music and performance
Ed Vulliamy
At the start of his 75-minute pre-concert lecture on Sunday, the incomparable András Schiff staked quite a claim for the piece he was about to perform: Bach’s The Art of Fugue was, he said: “the greatest work by the greatest composer who ever lived”.And a wise one: this concert was only the second time he would ever play it, the first having been in Berlin last January. Because, he said: “I’ve waited 70 years to play this work… You cannot climb Mount Everest immediately… this is the climax.”He continued with a poetic clarity akin to that of the piece itself. On the fact that it is unfinished Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
I have never seen the Wigmore Hall stage more crammed with instruments than for this Colin Currie Quartet concert. Sadly the auditorium was not similarly packed, the hall’s admirable initiative of broadening its repertoire away from mainly dead Germans being disappointingly shunned by the regular patrons.This amazing group deserved better – and the younger than usual audience were treated to a scintillating display of virtuosity. The programme was bookended by the music of Andy Akiho, who is himself a percussionist as well as composer, something that was clear from his deft handling of the Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
It’s hard to imagine that any London audience this winter will hear more thoroughly gorgeous singing – or more refined musical artistry all round – than Nardus Williams delivered at the Wigmore Hall on Sunday afternoon. This was a magical hour of early-Baroque Italian bliss.Williams, who once worked as a steward at Opera Holland Park before she starred on its stage, made her name with Mozart and Puccini. Recent recitals have seen the Worcester-born soprano shine with Handel heroines. This programme – solo, with just Elizabeth Kenny’s delicately dazzling theorbo for company – took us even Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
After a frozen week, the sensual languor of Berlioz’s Les nuits d’été promised warm respite at the Wigmore Hall – especially when delivered by house favourite Christian Gerhaher and his peerless pianist, Gerold Huber.Yet the Bavarian baritone saved that cycle for the end of a rainbow-hued recital that spanned a vast array of modes and moods: four composers, three languages (French, Russian and Czech, but no German), and solo interludes in which Huber played Chopin mazurkas and even the mighty Ballade No. 4 in F minor. The pair delivered more than generous measures, over a spectrum of styles Read more ...
David Nice
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 of Brahms. Last night Igor Levit seemed to favour the head, occasionally missing, for me, that very elusive something at the heart of Brahms’s late piano pieces.There can be no question of his magisterial oversight, though, or of how well 20 pieces in four consecutive opus numbers work in sequence. It was clear, for instance, how turbulence in one Read more ...
David Nice
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 Scherzos in sequence; Giltburg set them up with phenomenal insights into Scriabin and Schumann.He went in deep with perfect space around the noble beginnings of Scriabin’s relatively early (1890s) Second Sonata, that side of the composer very much, in Boris Pasternak’s words, “as tranquil and lucent as God resting from his labours on the seventh day”. Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
To understand the ambition of baritone James Newby, it helps to look up his video of Handel’s “Cara Pianta” from Apollo e Dafne. It would be remarkable by any standards for the fact that his head becomes gradually submerged by water while he’s delivering it, but Radiohead fans will also recognise it as a stylish parody of No Surprises performed by Thom Yorke.The first time I saw Newby singing live after watching this video, he was playing the male lead in Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas at the 2022 Proms, a difficult role which gave him little chance to demonstrate his expressive talents. By Read more ...
Bernard Hughes
The Wigmore Hall, the high church of Beethoven and Brahms, hosted something less elevated last night: a programme called “Hey for Christmas” presented by vocal ensemble Siglo de Oro and period instrument band Spinacino. The conceit was of recreating a mid-17th century English family’s musical diet through the Christmas season. And it was a whole lot of fun.As director Patrick Allies explained in his witty introduction, the scenario has traditional music as demanded by the older members of the family, while the teenage daughter is into contemporary dance music – and there is also a starchy Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Reviewing, they say, never gets easier. How can one possibly describe chamber music playing as good, as stupendously memorable, as last night’s all-Brahms programme from Dutch violinist Janine Jansen, English violist Timothy Ridout, Swedish cellist Daniel Blendulf and Russian-born pianist Denis Kozhukhin? (Clue: skip to the end for a three-word version.)Kozhukhin, at the centre of everything, was just fabulous. He really does have some very special qualities indeed to bring to Brahms. First, the listener has the assurance that every possible element of technique is Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
We think of the Wigmore Hall as a venue for intimate revelations, but in the right hands it can feel like a stadium. Last night’s all-Bach programme of festive music from the London Handel Players managed to embrace both moods.On a bill that began with three Advent or Christmas cantatas and finished with a Magnificat that sounded, well, magnificent, characterful solo parts for singers and instrumentalists combined with blazing ensemble climaxes that gave the impression of a stage populated by far more than five voices and 15 players. The outfit led by violinist-director Adrian Butterfield Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
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 now walks proudly across the world stage. Pianist Mariam Batsashvili, only just 30, won the Franz Liszt international competition in 2014 and has since been a BBC New Generation artist. Last night’s Wigmore Hall recital (not her first) put Liszt’s music at the heart of a programme that revealed the almost-symphonic textures and colours that a 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 ...