The “Festival Tour” and its three-venue concerts of the Davos Festival programme included almost as many visual and outdoor delights as it did musical treats.
A packed audience congregated in Wigmore Hall’s temple to pay homage at a very special concert in which Martha Argerich joined Stephen Kovacevich to mark his 75th birthday.
Schubert’s last three piano sonatas, published posthumously in 1839, were brought to new life with thrilling intensity and a sense of authority by one of Britain’s most self-effacing recitalists.
Arcadi Volodos is a big man, and when he sits down to the piano, he produces a big sound. The extraordinary richness of timbre was obvious from the first notes of Brahms' 6 Klavierstücke, Op.118.
Schubert cycles are in the air: earlier this month pianist James Lisney’s wide-ranging ‘Schubertreise’ series reached its journey’s end at London’s Purcell Room, and on Saturday evening Imogen Cooper concluded her own survey of Schubert’s piano sonatas with a performance of the last three sonatas to a packed, attentive and highly appreciative Wigmore Hall audience.
How radical can an exposition repeat be? Well, in the hands of Schubert, very radical indeed, it turns out. The sheer scale of the Molto moderato which opens his final piano sonata means that by the time the opening material returns a huge swathe of time has passed, so much so that each re-encountered phrase is seen in the light of all that happened in the mean time.
It is an extraordinary feat to take on Schubert’s Winterreise, Die Schöne Müllerin and Schwanengesang in three concerts over only five days, and performing them in Vienna’s Musikverein certainly does nothing to relieve the pressure.
Few venues do “faded grandeur” better than the Royal Conservatoire of Brussels. The auditorium of Belgium’s premier music college is a venerable grande dame of a concert hall – all off-white paint peeling from cracked walls and heavy red velvet curtains coated with dust – making it an elegant and alluring place in which to while away an evening, its imperfections lending a certain sepia-
Paul Lewis’ current tour constitutes the final instalment of his Schubert cycle. As is the fashion, largely following Artur Schnabel and more recently Alfred Brendel, Lewis plays the last three sonatas as a trilogy, with the D.958 and D.959 played before the interval and the D.960 afterwards.
If your ears happen to frequent the frequencies of the BBC’s classical music radio station, it’s highly possible that you’ll have been swamped by piano music this monsoon season.
C'est un elfe, ou plutôt une éphémère, cet insecte gracieux tout de gris argenté vêtu, qui entre en scène. Mitsuko Uchida en la grâce légère, la vivacité.
La actuación que reseñamos se condensa en algo muy sencillo, pero a la vez extremadamente complicado de enunciar mediante la crónica al uso: Schubert, el público y Volodos hicieron música.
En interprétant les Davidsbündlertänze op.8 de Robert Schumann et l'ultime Sonate en si bémol majeur n°21 D.960 de Franz Schubert, Adam Laloum dévoile une musicalité remarquable, subtile poésie et fruit d'une sensibilité hors du commun.
