Michael Church – live roundup Feb 2026
Wigmore Hall: Alim Beisembayev 9 Nov;
Barbican:
King’s Place:
We’ve recently enjoyed a period of great pianistic richness, with two recitals towering above the rest. The first was Bertrand Chamayou’s performance of Ravel’s complete piano oeuvre, with which he explained, in a prefatory note, his lifelong obsession. He first encountered Ravel’s music through seeing the score of Jeux d’eau when he was eight, and through hearing Vlado Perlemuter – who had worked with Ravel – play that same piece. Later, at the Paris Conservatory, Chamayou studied with Jean-Francois Heisser, who had been one of Perlemuter’s students. Since then, Chamayou says, he’s never stopped immersing himself in Ravel’s music. He cherishes Ravel’s Spanish influence, his love of ancient dances, his celebration of nature, and the music of composers to whom he has dedicated his own works: from Haydn to Borodin, via Chabrier and Gounod. Lasting well over two hours, and including several pieces which are seldom heard – A la manière de Borodine and Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn for example – this recital was a stupendous performance, reflecting every aspect of Ravel’s musical universe, from intimate gems to full-blooded masterpieces.
The other recital which enchanted me – and everyone else in a packed Barbican – was Arcadi Volodos’s take on Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A major D959. Instructions in the text for this late work are sparse, and pianists often play safe by keeping it as smooth as possible. But the one place where that’s impossible comes in the middle of the Andantino, where Schubert seems to have a raging breakdown. Trust Volodos to do something different: at the centre of this crazy outburst he turned his sound into something savage and ugly, with which we dwelt for a while before slipping back into calm melodiousness. Volodos’s treatment of the Rondo came over like an improvisation: listening to it, you’d think there were no bar-lines at all, as stray thoughts – sometimes just broken bits of a phrase – surfaced hesitantly out of the surrounding silence. But the sound was sweetly malleable, if at times on the edge of audibility: the basic material of this movement may be simple, but the effects he achieves with it are wonderfully eloquent. His next CD will apparently include a live recording of some Schubert; if this sonata is included, we may get another chance to penetrate the mystery he’s presented through it.
All this was a far cry from the impossible-sounding arrangements of familiar classics which is how we first knew Volodos. But he reminded us of that, with his arrangement of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 13 in A minor, and with one of his hair-raisingly daunting encores. He’s loyal to his own musical past, and even to those encores: Schubert’s whimsical third Moment Musical of the Opus 94 set was an encore here, and I remember him playing that same piece as an encore, in the same hall, five years ago. Curious.
If you go by the results of the 2024 edition of the Leeds competition, all is well in that department. At the Wigmore we heard the Canadian winner Jaeden Izik Dzurko, and the Vietnamese player Khanh ni Luong who won third place, and I was impressed by both. Dzurko brought a clean and muscular touch to Bach’s Fourth Partita, then created huge climaxes and gorgeous washes of sound in the opening movement of Franck’s Prelude, choral, et fugue. His account of Rachmaninov’s 10 Preludes Opus 23 was a fascinating emotional exploration, with each movement exquisitely characterised.
Classical pianists from Vietnam are a rare species, but Khanh Ni Luong had no need of an exotic background to pull the crowd: her recital was brilliantly varied and immaculately delivered. She began with a gracefully paced and beautifully singing account of Schubert’s Sonata in A D664, in which her tempo for the Andante was unusually slow though powerfully eloquent. Her wild card was a crazy patchwork of miniatures by Kate Whitley entitled Five Tiny Piano Pieces, which did what it said on the tin. That was followed by two elegantly played Intermezzi by Brahms, after which we got the piece de résistance – Henri Dutilleux’s Piano Sonata, an intricate work which demands more than one hearing to release its secrets. Her single encore, by Pang Phuc, was entitled Bunches of Flowers of Vietnam. This was another wild card delivered with élan: one could almost hear her laughing as she swept out of the auditorium.
A different whiff of the Orient came when – casting off his Mozartian mantle – Mao Fujita gave a recital consisting mainly of sets of variations, and he showed himself admirably flexible. He delivered the folk-song variations in Brahms’s First Piano Sonata with mournful grace, and made an intelligent stab at Berg’s mysterious 12 Variations on an Original Theme. Mendelssohn’s Variations Sérieuses is an uneven work, beginning in persuasively dour magnificence, but long outstaying its welcome (and inspiration); Fujita made a fine fist of it, but couldn’t redeem the flashiness of the conclusion. Liszt’s Isoldes Liebestod – with which he ended his recital – was an irresistible dive into pianistic lusciousness. The decorously hesitant bow he gave at the end embodied the quintessence of old Japan.
Staying with the East, but impeded by a sudden domestic crisis, I only managed to hear half the London recital by 23-year-old Manami Suzuki, the first Japanese pianist to win the Hamamatsu competition: she has much promise, but is still a relatively raw talent. She opened with a sparkling Haydn sonata, but her account of the harmonically complex B flat minor fugue from Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier Book 2 was marred by a broad-brush fortissimo. On the other hand she found mysterious poetry in Szymanowski’s Metopy Opus 29 No 1, and brought a brilliant touch to his Scriabin-like Metopy No 3. Her sound control is not yet very refined, but she’s definitely one to watch.
Variations were the focus of Danny Driver’s latest Wigmore concert. All the world wants to play Bach’s Goldbergs these days, but Driver has had the unusual idea of teaming them with Haydn’s darkly majestic Variations in F minor and Schubert’s Impromptu in B flat, to which he brought a surprising new facet. It’s there in the score, but most musicians carry on smoothly and don’t observe the fact that the second bar before the end is marked with an almost simultaneous forte/piano. But the way Driver played it – inserting a sepulchral musical groan and an agonised pause – cast a retrospective shadow over everything that had gone before. This was a strange and compelling moment, after which the Goldbergs emerged in a riot of colour. Driver has a monastic presence, but his playing has beefy energy. There were no histrionics in the slow variations, but the music was deeply felt, and the overall effect was one of celebration.
The young Kazakh pianist Alim Beisembayev has never courted publicity. But despite his diffident manner publicity seems to seek him out – as when he emerged from relative obscurity to win the 2021 Leeds competition, and when he stepped in at 48 hours’ notice to give an acclaimed performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 at a BBC Prom. He’s super-cautious about recording, having released only one CD to date, but he’s going full tilt as a recitalist. In his latest Wigmore outing he brought a beautifully transparent touch to Debussy’s Images, and a magnificent range of colours and textures to Schumann’s Ētudes Symphoniques; he wound up with a thrilling account of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No 2. There is always something relaxed about Beisembayev’s pianism, no matter how tempestuous the demands of the score. That’s your reward if – like Beisambayev – you start your career by putting in many years of merciless slog in a Russian conservatoire.
I usually read programme notes after hearing a concert, not before, but in the case of Jean Rondeau’s Louis Couperin recital, I regretted that I hadn’t read Andrew Frampton’s illuminating programme essay first. I needed to know in advance that Couperin’s dances are not organised into a pre-determined order, and that it’s up to the player to construct their own suites.
Rondeau’s recital was extraordinary. Apart from small emergency lights the auditorium was dark, with just the harpsichord cocooned in soft orange light. Of the player himself nothing could be seen apart from his hands, so complete was the surrounding blackness. It all felt like a conjuring trick, with Rondeau’s tempi mostly so gentle that they too contributed to that effect. This normally flamboyant creature even acknowledged his applause in darkness: as a critic I was disarmed, and ninety minutes sped pleasurably by.
Two years ago I took the German pianist Elisabeth Brauss to task for a recital in which her interpretations veered between brilliant and startlingly perverse. I suggested she look for an advisor to rein in her wilder flights, and her latest Wigmore foray suggests she has found one. I turned up braced to be cross, but left with her golden sounds ringing in my ears. Her programme had seemed in advance misshapen – five of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, four short pieces by the Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen, Liszt’s Variationen über das Motiv von Bach S180, and Beethoven’s Sonata Opus 110, but every bar of her performance had authority. Abrahamsen’s pieces were exercises in atmospheric evocation, and in Brauss’s hands the Grieg pieces assumed a heroic monumentality, while Liszt’s variations – a memorial to his daughter Blandine – were shot through with pain and grief. Beethoven’s Opus 110 ran here an emotional gamut from gentle rumination, via mischievous turbulence and graceful formality, to a triumphalism which shook the rafters. Come back soon.
One much-loved soloist who won’t be coming back is 76-year-old Imogen Cooper, who at her latest Wigmore recital announced her retirement. Her programme was simple, and perfectly apposite: Schubert’s eight Impromptus, to which she brought the wisdom of a lifetime’s immersion in their sound-world. This powerfully expressive performance showed Cooper at her best, its valedictory melange of moods reflecting the mood of the occasion; her ruminative encore – Schubert’s Allegretto in C minor D915 – suggested nostalgia, gratitude, and a strange watchfulness. After the Duke of Kent (a Wigmore regular) had presented her with the Wigmore medal, she thanked her loyal audience, then told them they couldn’t get rid of her that fast, as she’d be back playing chamber music later in the year.