Wigmore Hall
Nikolai Demidenko, Wigmore HallMonday, 07 December 2009
Piano ballades and fantasies are the repositories of dreams. They are the places where the mind is left to wander, to roam precipitously, unaided by known paths, undisturbed by familiar structures. The romantic fantasies and ballades of last night's... Read more... |
Wolfgang Holzmair, Andreas Haefliger, Wigmore HallSunday, 29 November 2009
There’s something beyond detailed and attentive musicianship that’s needed in Schubert’s last, most desolate song-cycle, Winterreise (“Winter’s journey”). It’s a dramatic arc that unites these 24 songs into a journey, the number of breaths in time... Read more... |
Elisabeth Leonskaja, Wigmore HallMonday, 23 November 2009
Elisabeth Leonskaja, who turned 64 on Sunday, is one of the last links to a grand school of Russian pianism where technique meant the marshalling of piano possibilities into a positively orchestral array of expressive means. Often noted in harness... Read more... |
Till Fellner, Wigmore HallWednesday, 21 October 2009
Much like Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in G, Op 79, with which he started the programme, I’ll get straight to the point. Till Fellner is a very good pianist. To demonstrate this, I’d like to jump to the last sonata of five we heard in this all-Beethoven... Read more... |
Imogen Cooper 60th Birthday Concert, Wigmore HallMonday, 28 September 2009
The great and the good came to Imogen Cooper’s 60th birthday concert. In fact, so thick with friends and fellow pianists was the Wigmore Hall, that at the end there seemed to be as many people going backstage to congratulate her as were leaving... Read more... |
Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra, Wigmore HallMonday, 21 September 2009Andrew Parrott, director of the Taverner Consort, once told me of a time he was playing harpsichord at the back of a largish orchestra. Confident that nothing he played would stand the remotest chance of being heard above the general cacophony, he “... Read more... |
Matthias Goerne, Alexander Schmalcz, Wigmore HallSunday, 20 September 2009
When you go to a Schubert recital, you’re plunged into a whirlpool of emotional ambivalence, heat and chill running together, music and lyrics not always playing the same tune. When Schubert seizes on a poem, it’s not because he’s interested in... Read more... |
A Henry Purcell Birthday Celebration, Wigmore HallMonday, 14 September 2009
What a splendid little ensemble the Purcell Quartet is. The sort of group that you rather hope might reduce in size as the years go on, so that in the end you can put them in your pocket and carry them around with you all the time. If ever an... Read more... |
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