Michael Church – live roundup March 2025

 

Wigmore Hall: Roman Rabinovich 17 Nov; Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, 27 Nov; Nikolai Lugansky 8 Dec; Kit Armstrong 22 Dec; Danny Driver 2 Jan 2025; Alim Beisembayev 9 Jan; Imogen Cooper 16 Jan

Royal Festival Hall: Mitsuko Uchida 1 Feb

Barbican: Stephen Hough 4 Dec

 

The pianist standing tallest in this three-month batch was Stephen Hough, who delighted a packed Barbican audience with a box of surprises which only he could have devised. First he threw down a gauntlet with three short pieces by Cécile Chaminade, challenging the usual pigeon-holing of this French composer as a purveyor of salon music of no importance. One could sense the ghosts of Chopin, Schumann, and Tchaikovsky hovering as Hough teased out the qualities of these finely-wrought little pieces, but he made his point: this was a composer with a voice of her own.

Then came Schumann’s Fantasie in C minor, its outer movements testifying to the composer’s ardently beating heart and its middle movement going at one hell of a lick, after which Hough swivelled on his bench to address us: his next piece would be the London premiere of his latest composition, Sonatina Nostalgica. This reflected his affectionate memories of the corner of Cheshire where he grew up, and its musical language bore more than a little resemblance to Chaminade’s.

Yes, more salon music, but so what? Sandwiched between white-hot Schumann and Chopin’s equally white-hot Sonata No 3 in B minor which followed, we needed a gentle break. Hough’s account of the latter was predictably impressive: whatever he plays from his huge repertoire emerges technically immaculate and perfectly idiomatic. His final surprise came in the second encore, that being Hough’s dizzy arrangement of the Sherman Brothers’ signature tune in Mary Poppins. Here centuries of musical culture were put through a blender, with fleeting appearances by the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata and the Diabelli Variations…

 

I normally associate Jean-Efflam Bavouzet with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, composers whose music he has recorded at length; a recital devoted to Schumann, Debussy, and Stockhausen might, I thought, reveal different strengths. In this programme Schumann’s Kinderszenen were interwoven with Debussy’s Reverie, his Arabesque No 2, his Berceuse héroïque, Children’s Corner, and his Etudes Book 2; Schumann’s Arabeske in C was juxtaposed with Debussy’s Arabesque; Stockhausen was represented by his Klavierstück IX.

Debussy’s Ētudes emerged spring-heeled and flexible, and Children’s Corner came with some delightful effects, but Bavouzet’s account of Kinderszenen was so perfunctory, and so devoid of character or poetry, that I wondered why he’d bothered to programme it. All the two Arabesques had in common was their name, so no surprises there either.

As for the Stockhausen… well, I’ve never been able to take that piece seriously, and despite a passionate impromptu lecture by Bavouzet, plus some special pleading in the programme note, I still can’t do so. Two hundred repetitions of a long-held single chord which gradually changes colour? ‘A masterpiece’ purred Bavouzet… Never mind: his encore – Ravel’s Toccata – had real sparkle.

 

Born to piano-teacher parents 40 years ago in Soviet Tashkent, Roman Rabinovich was a talented child who progressed from the Uspensky School of Music in Tashkent to the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music in Tel Aviv, and thence to the Curtis Institute; he won the Rubinstein Competition aged 23. He made a splash in 2018 with the first volume of a complete set of Haydn sonatas, his sound being finely judged throughout. On its cover was proof that he is also an accomplished graphic artist; and as he’s revealed in recital, he is also an interesting composer.

So I went to his latest Wigmore recital with high hopes. The Haydn sonata with which he began was fine, if sometimes a bit strident, and his playing in Debussy’s Estampes had elegant and original touches; Schumann’s Etudes Symphoniques came over rather splashily, and were occasionally punctuated by absurdly theatrical pauses.

But the programme’s intended centre of gravity was a rendition of Beethoven’s Opus 110 which was – I do not exaggerate – like finding a black spider in one’s soup. The ruminative opening phrases, in which Beethoven put his heart on his sleeve, were delivered in an angry metallic fortissimo. And Rabinovich had clearly started as he meant to go on, despatching the first movement – and despatched really is the word – painfully loud and with a hard metronomic beat, and without a hint of the poetry asked for by the score. He clearly didn’t know what to do with the recitativo passages, he took the first Fugue too loud too soon, and ditto the last triumphant lap. This was a musical murder: what had got into him?

 

The Taiwanese-British pianist Kit Armstrong is without doubt the most egregious figure on the current pianistic scene. I first encountered him when he was playing Beethoven’s first piano concerto at twelve (beautifully) at the Royal Academy of music, by which time he had already completed a high-flying undergraduate course in maths at the University of California. In interview after his performance, it emerged that he was also a whizz at five-ball juggling, and at creating ultra-complex origami. Since then – he is now 32 – he has created an artists’ colony in rural France, while forging a parallel career in AI research; his discography includes a collection of pieces by William Byrd and John Bull, both of whom he argues are of seminal music-historical importance.

But his recent Wigmore recital was a disappointment. It was prefaced by a quasi-philosophical programme essay by him on the history of music, which seemed only half-digested. The nearest it came to stating his intention in this recital was this gnomic apercu: ‘Creating a link between the past and the present… Taking old music sheets and inventing something based on them which evokes an amazing vision of a timeless world.’ He promised a verbal commentary on the works as he went along, but his un-miked commentary was only audible to those in the first few rows, where I wasn’t sitting.

All most of us heard was the music, which made good sense in the first half, in that it followed a line from Tallis to Handel in which harmonic complexity developed incrementally. But his second half was a mere grab-bag of Mozart, Saint-Saëns, Godowsky, Sorabji, Pärt – and Armstrong. All well played, but embodying no discernible argument. If Armstrong really believes he is on to something significant, he should get himself a mike and rewrite his introduction, with a ruthless editor looking over his shoulder as he does so. If he does that, I promise to come back and write about it.

 

After all of which it was a relief to hear two senior pianists with a clear game-plan. Nikolai Lugansky was the first, playing exactly the same programme as he played in Verbier last summer (which I reviewed enthusiastically in this magazine). So we got six Mendelssohn Songs without Words; two Ballades and a Nocturne by Chopin; Lugansky’s own transcription of four scenes from Götterdämmerung, and finally with Liszt’s version of Isolde’s Liebestod. I always mistrust my memory when comparing performances many months apart – one’s supposedly subjective responses are always coloured by one’s mood on the day. This time it seemed to me that Lugansky’s touch was too rough in Chopin’s fourth Ballade, and that his own Wagner transcriptions lacked adequate signposts and went on far too long.

Danny Driver’s recital, on the other hand, was pure pleasure. Beginning with two Chopin Nocturnes, he went on to play Ligeti’s provocative Musica Ricercata as a series of highly atmospheric impressions, suggesting an exhilarating journey of exploration. And for his centrepiece he gave the world premiere of a work by Thomas Simaku entitled Catena 4, which might have been designed to hold that position in this recital. Because its fourth section was a homage to Chopin (built on the exact notes of the start of Chopin’s First Ballade), and its fifth was a homage to Ligeti, and its eighth bore the subtitle ‘Ligeti Meets Chopin’. It all felt like an improvisation, sometimes monosyllabic, sometimes garrulous, and sometimes with purling high notes contrasting with manually plucked strings in the bass. Driver rounded things off with a sequence of pieces by Chopin and Fauré which came from the heart. There was no encore – and why should there have been one, with a programme so perfectly shaped?

One could say the same of Alim Beisembayev’s recital, with its serene sequence of Haydn, Beethoven, Scarlatti, Schumann and Brahms, though he gave three encores ending with Beethoven’s expostulatory ‘Rage over a lost penny’. He brought freshness to Kinderszenen, and a magisterial gravity to Haydn’s Variations in F minor; three rarely-played Scarlatti sonatas cast delicate spells at opposite ends of the tempo spectrum, and Brahms’s Paganini Variations were infused with regal splendour.

But the revelation was what he did with Beethoven’s Sonata in D Opus 10 No 3, whose opening swept through the auditorium as though an electric current had suddenly been switched on. I had never before heard this work sound so dramatic, as Beisembayev found effects which most pianists unheedingly gloss over, with the Largo e mesto acquiring a dark and deathly magnificence. Every bar of this recital compelled rapt attention, as this 27-year-old Kazakh brought to bear his fastidious sound control and fertile imagination. He could become one of the all-time greats.

 

As Leif Ove Andsnes grows older, he becomes ever keener to boost the music of his native land. The main pleasure of his latest recital may have been his glorious account of Chopin’s Preludes, but the political thrust lay in his performance of Grieg’s early Piano Sonata in E minor, and is Geirr Tveitt’s Piano Sonata Etere. The Grieg possessed the seeds of that composer’s mature music, but was a prentice effort. The now almost completely forgotten Geirr Tveitt (1908-1981), however, deserves remembering for more than the heroic nationalism and nobly endured hardships of his life.  Two thirds of his compositions were destroyed in a fire at his remote family farm, with the ‘Etere’ (”ether”) sonata, premiered in 1947, being the only solo sonata to survive. The Wigmore’s programme note by Mark Rogers was a valiant attempt to explain the structure and intention of this work – involving unusual pedal effects and much manual plucking and damping of the strings – with the total effect varying from the ethereal to the forbiddingly austere. With a work as hermetic as this, one hearing is not enough.

 

When Imogen Cooper plays Beethoven, people stand to attention, particularly when the programme is the last three sonatas. One knows there will never be anything tricksy or meretricious in her playing; any departure from the norm in these works will have been deeply pondered. And thus it was with this recital. The first movement of Opus 109 was blissfully accurate, so how come its simple closing chord felt so pregnant with meaning? The answer was a matter of infinitesimally delicate timing and volume. The arpeggiations in the opening movement of Opus 110 went at an unusually gentle pace, while its Allegro molto had an aggressive roughness; the opening page of Opus 111 was darkly savage. The finale of Opus 110 gave a strong sense of embracing the future, while the murmuring close of Opus 111 left us joyfully transported.

 

The season’s other unalloyed pleasure was a visit to the Royal Festival Hall by the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, with two Mozart concertos directed from the piano by the incomparable Mitsuko Uchida. She may now be 76, but she’s still batting tirelessly round the world, and prefacing her performances with bows so athletically low that her face almost touches the floor. Her authority was unobtrusive, and her pianism exquisite, bringing a confidential tone to Concerto No 18 in B flat, and furnishing a highly idiosyncratic cadenza to Concerto No 21 in C. Her encore was a tiny miniature – Aveu from Schumann’s Carnaval – which came and went like a breath of perfumed air.