piano
Alfred Brendel 1931-2025 - a personal tributeFriday, 27 June 2025
Alfred Brendel’s death earlier this month came as a shock, but it wasn’t unexpected. His health had gradually deteriorated over the last year or so, and I was fortunate to see him just a few days before he died. I visited him for one of our regular... Read more... |
Schubertiade 3 at the Ragged Music Festival, Mile End review - five great musicians keep spirits soaringTuesday, 24 June 2025
Aldeburgh offered strong competition for the three evenings of Schubert at the discreetly restored Ragged School Museum, but I knew I had to return for the last event of Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy’s third festival here, much as I’d love to... Read more... |
Immersive Night Music Show, Makita, Londinium Ensemble, World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens - multimedia musings on a midsummer nightTuesday, 24 June 2025
To mark this year’s summer solstice, a small audience gathered at London’s newest concert venue, the World Heart Beat Embassy Gardens, a small and perfectly formed hall bristling with “state-of-the-art” acoustics and digital facilities. On a balmy... Read more... |
Elephant, Menier Chocolate Factory review - subtle, humorous exploration of racial identity and musicSaturday, 31 May 2025
This charmingly eloquent semi-autobiographical show – which first played at the Bush Theatre in 2022 – tells the story of a girl whose life growing up in a council flat is transformed by the arrival of an upright piano. Lylah – like the show’s... Read more... |
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, Wigmore Hall review - too big a splash in complete RavelFriday, 16 May 2025
It was a daring idea to mark Ravel’s 150th birthday year with a single concert packing in all his works for solo piano. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet knows them by heart, has bags of charisma and energy, so why not? I could give more than one reason, but the... Read more... |
Karim Said, Leighton House review - adventures from Byrd to SchoenbergWednesday, 14 May 2025
William Byrd, Arnold Schoenberg and their respective acolytes go cheek by jowl, crash into one another, soothe, infuriate and shine in their very different ways This is all in a typical programme of pianist, conductor, composer and all-round pioneer... Read more... |
Philharmonia, Alsop, RFH / Levit, Abramović, QEH review - misalliance and magical marathonSaturday, 26 April 2025
“Let the music guide your imagination” was never going to be the slogan of the Southbank Centre’s Multitudes festival. Its 13 events offer parallel visions, intended in the case of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (a shared project between the LPO and... Read more... |
Goldberg Variations, Ólafsson, Wigmore Hall review - Bach in the shadow of BeethovenMonday, 14 April 2025
Víkingur Ólafsson had something to prove at the Wigmore Hall. And prove it he did, even if, this time, his Goldberg Variations left a few features of Bach’s inexhaustible keyboard panorama at the edge of his pianistic picture. The much-loved... Read more... |
Biss, National Symphony Orchestra, Kuokman, NCH Dublin review - full house goes wild for vivid epicsSaturday, 29 March 2025
On paper, it was a standard programme with no stars to explain how this came to be a sellout concert. But packed it was, an audience of all ages which sat with concentrated awe through the spellbinding slow movement of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto... Read more... |
Batsashvili, Hallé, Wong, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester review - a star in the piano universeTuesday, 25 March 2025
Mariam Batsashvili, the young virtuosa pianist from Georgia, is a star. No doubt about that. Trained at the Liszt Academy in Weimar and winner of the International Franz Liszt Competition for Young Pianists in that city in 2015, she should know... Read more... |
Bavouzet, BBCSO, Stasevska, Barbican review - ardent souls in mythic magicThursday, 13 March 2025
Not to be overshadowed by the adrenalin charges of the Budapest Festival Orchestra the previous evening, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its Principal Guest Conductor Dalia Stasevska gave a supercharged triple whammy of masterpieces. They even had a... Read more... |
Levit, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Fischer, RFH review - anger unleashed, fantasy finessed in ProkofievWednesday, 12 March 2025
A showstopper for starters followed by dark depths, a quirky compilation after the interval: it’s what you might expect from Iván Fischer and his 42-year-old Budapest Festival Orchestra. All Prokofiev, too: the sort of thing we used to get from... Read more... |
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