To paraphrase Tom Service’s words as compère at Kings Place last night: when faced with your inner demons, there are two choices – fight or flight. Mozart treated us to blissful escape. Shostakovich stood shoulder to shoulder with us as we faced our demons down.
For the Mozart Piano Concerto no. 23 in A major, played in Ignaz Lachner’s chamber arrangement, Aurora Orchestra was reduced to its five principal string players and joined by pianist Steven Osborne. It took me longer than I expected to accept the loss of richness of sound caused by the reduced forces, but I soon warmed to the benefits of greater clarity in detail of the harmonies and in individual instrumental timbre. I particularly enjoyed the earthy tones of Ben Griffiths’ double bass as one could hear his bow grip the strings.
Osborne’s playing was understated to the point of self-effacement. But while I might have preferred the piano to be more forward, with more rumble in the lower registers, I could do nothing but marvel at Osborne’s smoothness: the legato passages so even that each phrase was a single flowing entity, but with each note ringing clearly. When Mozart gave us isolated notes rather than continuous phrases, Osborne showed exceptional delicacy of touch in giving each note exactly the right weight to make its musical point. The second movement Adagio was a thing of serene beauty, the warmth of low strings, the lovely interplay between soloist and string players and the release of suspended chords bringing us to a deeply satisfying place of happiness. The rondo finale brought cheer, albeit with a level of self-control; we never quite had carefree abandon.
Listening to the Shostakovich Piano Quintet in G minor, a doctor would not take long to diagnose bipolar disorder. The music reaches heights of sublime calm that would do Mozart proud, but then, before you know it, the string sound has tightened into a state of extreme, gut-wrenching stress. And then the tension relaxes: the composer has grabbed us by the hand, led us to the brink of the abyss, forced us to stare down it, and then gently led us back. The weight of tread is constantly changing, at its most heavy-footed in the demonic third movement Scherzo: always in three time, we move from a heavily accented but cheerful dance into the epitome of the demonic fiddler and then a raucous village dance. The pace of mood shifts was dizzying.