Wigmore Hall: Andras Schiff 7 June; Nicolas Namoradze 23 June; Kirill Gerstein 16 July

Barbican: Evgeny Kissin 25 June;

Ragged School Festival: Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy 20 June

 

Nicolas Namoradze is best known these days as a prolific composer, and as a provocatively original thinker on how the disciplines of neuropsychology may be applied to the piano (see my interview with him in the XXX issue of this magazine). So it was good to be reminded, in his latest Wigmore foray, that he is also a formidable recitalist, having been taught by Zoltan Kocsis, Andras Schiff, and most devotedly by Emanuel Ax, and also having won the Honens Competition in 2018. His new programme might be summed up as an illustration of the development of counterpoint, but each of its component parts was fascinating in itself.

He made something bewitching out of Skryabin’s mysterious Piano Sonata No 10, with its woodland echoes and its recurring Schubertian motif, and he delicately sculpted the contours of the Andante of the same composer’s Sonata Fantasy. These works were interspersed with gracefully expressive accounts of two Preludes and Fugues from Bach’s 48, and with Skryabin’s early Fugue in E minor which could easily have been by JS Bach as well, so closely was it modelled on the master’s style and sound-world. Then Namoradze gave the most original account of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier I have heard in a long time. There were times when I questioned his tempi in the opening Allegro, and I wanted a more tender touch in the Adagio, but with this essentially intellectual performer you feel that he’s thought through every bar. The result was a dizzyingly fast fugue, and a brilliantly reconfigured closing stretch. After the applause, he asked if we’d mind if he played his own piano arrangement of two movements from Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe, as he wanted to see how they worked. Our answer was a resounding affirmative: elegantly arranged, and brilliantly executed, they showed yet another facet of this remarkable man.

 

Andras Schiff’s Wigmore recitals have of late all followed the same pattern: no pre-announced programme, just avuncular ruminations interlarded with snatches of pianism. There was no pre-announced programme for his latest appearance: he restricted himself to a few remarks about the works he would play, before playing them all straight through. From Bach to Haydn to Mozart to Beethoven, he sailed along serenely, before rounding things off with Schubert’s Fantasy Sonata in G followed by two Chopin Mazurka encores. He’d clearly had an enjoyable 90 minutes, and so had we. But is it time he stepped outside his comfort zone? His recitals are becoming cosily predictable.

 

Khatia Buniatishvili’s final concert in her Barbican residency – entitled ‘Khatia and Friends’ – looked like being a whole evening of self-congratulatory cosiness, but when the lighting went down to a soft glow and this fiery Georgian launched into a whispered account of the Bach-Siloti Prelude in B minor, I was disarmed. This was an evening of what are usually termed lollipops, but it had a serious intention. Nicola Benedetti led the friends, who included three pianists I had not heard before – Sodi Braide, Helene Mercier, and Buniatishvili’s pianist sister Gvantsa – plus mezzo Axelle Saint-Cirel and countertenor Jakub Orlinski. And with a rapid mix of combinations in twos, threes, fours, and eights, plus poems read by an actor, we got through 22 numbers with Khatia popping up in most of them; the final flourish was a terrifying display of airborne break-dancing by Orlinski. This made a refreshing change from the usual tight-lipped chamber format: other musicians should follow suit.

 

Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy are ceaselessly inventive, and their most imaginative project so far is the Ragged School Festival which they host in the bad-lands of London’s East End. Their auditorium may have an excellent chamber acoustic, but it’s actually a pristine Victorian classroom. The night I attended, Tsoy played fast and loose with the tempi of the B flat major sonata D 960, but Kolesnikov brilliantly despatched the G major sonata D 894; they then delivered the four-hand Divertissement àla hongroise D 818, an over-extended work but in their hands nicely effective.

 

My most memorable moment in the period under review was the image of Evgeny Kissin bursting into poetry while being interviewed onstage by Steven Isserlis, and declaiming his own Yiddish translation of ‘To be, or not to be’. That was at the Wigmore: at the Barbican, meanwhile, he presented a programme which followed an arc delivered with bracing authority. First he took us on a journey through Bach’s second Partita, starting with the Sinfonia in hard, cold clarity, before letting lyricism in with the Sarabande and climaxing in a joyful Capriccio. Two Chopin nocturnes led on to the splendour of that composer’s E major Scherzo. Then we were led through the dark shades of Shostakovich’s introverted (and to me unlovable) Second Piano Sonata, before coming out into the sunlight with two of his most astonishing Preludes and Fugues (in D flat major and D minor respectively); his main encore was a magnificent account of Chopin’s Scherzo No 2. A glorious event, and a perfect masterclass for the Far Eastern piano students who packed the auditorium.

 

But the most unexpected recital was Kirill Gerstein’s garland of pieces inspired by flowers and waltzes, teasingly juxtaposing easy-listening with hermetic mysteriousness. What does Ades have to do with Schumann, or Kurtag with Tchaikovsky? Gerstein took us into a charmed world where the unlikeliest connections became commonplace, and where a graceful 70-second miniature by Ades could hold its own in company with Schumann’s thunderously hurtling Faschingsschwank aus Wien. In this telling, Kurtag seemed for once relatively garrulous, and Tchaikovsky’s Waltz of the Flowers came out in roaring bandstand style, thanks to Percy Grainger’s arrangement. Several of the pieces had been written expressly for this Russian-American virtuoso, but his blazing pianism and searching originality made everything he touched his own.