Wigmore Hall
Gavin Dixon
Paul Lewis secured his reputation as a leading advocate of the Viennese Classical repertoire with two releases of late Schubert sonatas on Harmonia Mundi. That was 20 years ago, but he returned to Schubert in 2022, with a release of earlier sonatas, music that requires more interpretive personality, something that Lewis can always provide.For these Wigmore recitals (this the first, the same programme is being repeated on 1 May), Lewis presents two of the late sonatas, D840 "Reliquie" and D845, plus one of the earlier works on his new album, D664. The results are as fine as ever, without any Read more ...
David Nice
Rigorous, hauntingly original and unlike each other, Britten’s three numbered quartets could share a programme and still stake equal claims on our attention. That might be tough on the players, but the Castalians haven’t been easy on themselves in the three concerts they’ve given to share out the honours between Britten and other composers.Their previous spectacular pulled off the supreme challenge of twinning the “Grosse Fuge” as finale of Beethoven’s Op. 130 Quartet with the huge Chacony that crowns Britten’s Second. The Passacaglia of his Third, completed in 1975 not long before his death Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
French-Danish soprano Elsa Dreisig’s operatic schedule is so busy and so successful, it is perhaps not surprising that she – and Texas-born pianist Jonathan Ware – treat the song recital platform as a place of freedom, where, rather than delivering the predictable or the comforting, they can test out ideas and set themselves challenges. As she has told one interviewer, it is a place where "I can push my artistic practice to its ultimate limit."In the early stages of their recital a deep dive into French fin-de-siecle aestheticism, they occasionally drew that particular kind of slightly Read more ...
David Nice
In search of relatively rare fabulous beasts like César Franck’s Piano Quintet – given a fantastical performance last night – you often have to take in the ubiquitous Shostakovich specimen, the modest work of a master using simple means to his own creative ends that doesn’t bear too much repeated listening over a short space of time.That won’t have been the case for most of the audience last night, who would have been rightly satisfied by the fire and poetry in the partnership of the Belcea Quartet – with a rare visitor as second violinist, the compelling Paweł Zalejski of the equally fine Read more ...
David Nice
This Palm Sunday served up an epiphany. Previous encounters with Handel's Messiah, in whatever version, and whether listening or performing, turned out to have been through a glass darkly. And here we were face to face with undiluted genius, served with total consistency by 26 musicians running the gamut from intimacy through fury to great blazes, all guided by the extraordinary spirit of IBO artistic director Peter Whelan.You’ll perhaps have noticed that the choir is without a name. Clearly the Irish Baroque Orchestra needs one of its own, and these 12 would be the dream team – perhaps eight Read more ...
David Nice
When your special guest is a young soprano with all the world before her, the total artist already, your programme might seem to run itself. Yet the Dunedin Consort’s sequence seen and heard in Glasgow, Edinburgh and (last night) London followed a proper musical logic, running together an overture, a ballet and a cantata in the first half, and pulling focus on Handel’s early years in Rome, all supremely inventive music – though the later G minor Concerto Grosso which launched the second half is in a class of its own.The Dunedins are as classy as said guest, Nardus Williams: both are poised, Read more ...
Sebastian Scotney
Stefan Zweig once wrote that the difference between Busoni and every other pianist he had ever heard was the way the influential Tuscan-born Germanophile performer, composer and intellectual would always appear to be listening so intently to his own playing, “his uplifted face full of blissful rapture, which turns to stone in sweet awe at the Medusa-like beauty of the music.”Kirill Gerstein, who last night at Wigmore Hall gave the second of three concerts in a themed series “Busoni and his world”, is a superb pianist, and is similarly mesmerising to watch. He rocks gently back and forth and Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
In a recent interview with the New York Times, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet mischievously described interpreting Haydn’s piano sonatas as “putting clothes on a rather naked skeleton… You have this joy of bringing it to life with all the tools you can imagine.”Certainly the French pianist is well positioned to talk about exhuming not just Haydn’s music but key aspects of his reputation following his release last year of an acclaimed recording of all 62 of his too often neglected piano sonatas.For his lunchtime recital at the Wigmore, Bavouzet opened with a version of Haydn’s 1773 Sonata No. 24 in D Read more ...
David Nice
It’s not often that the most bittersweet moment in a rich concert comes in the encore. Elisabeth Leonskaja had already played the generous extra in question, the Dumka movement of Dvořák’s A major Piano Quintet, with the Staatskapelle Quartet only a fortnight earlier. Here, fine-tuned with the Jerusalems, that moment when the joyfully flowing episode turns dark and the piano seems to call from a dark wood proved sheer magic.There wasn’t a moment in this concert where anyone in the audience could (or should) have lost concentration, The Jerusalems’ art is flexible, almost improvisatory in feel Read more ...
David Nice
What a difference a piano can make. Boris Giltburg, like Angela Hewitt, prefers a very special Fazioli over the Steinways which dominate the concert scene at the Wigmore Hall and elsewhere. While those may yield a greater depth of field, more appropriate for a 2000 seater venue, few pianists have wrought sound magic on them anything like the kind we heard throughout last night’s rich recital.I’d better explain where a slight resistance kicked in across the wonders of the Chopin Ballades, which Giltburg presented as a sequence: like Schubert’s D899 Impromptus, the result came over as a kind of Read more ...
David Nice
It’s dangerous to claim a sense of absolute rightness about a musical performance; that could mean no more than responding to an interpretation which happens to chime with your own subjective expectations. Yet I’m happy to stick my neck out and say that the partnership of septuagenarian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja with the young Staatskapelle Quartet of Berlin felt absolutely right in works by Brahms that cry out in every bar for authentic musicianship (★★★★★).Maybe that’s true of all the great chamber works. But Brahms draws on a unique wellspring of original melody and rhythmic ingenuity in Read more ...
David Nice
The Castalian String Quartet is half what I remember, but only literally: while viola-player Charlotte Bonneton and cellist Christopher Graves may have departed, their replacements, Ruth Gibson and Steffan Morris, more than earned their laurels in last night’s stunning programme.There's another instance where half is just as good. The Castalians' Britten mini-series only highlights how we wish Britten had written twice as many numbered string quartets as he did – Bartók's half dozen allow for a bigger spead across a season – but who’s complaining when all three are masterpieces, and No Read more ...