Royal Festival Hall
Mozart – Piano Sonata no.16 in C major, KV 545
Schumann
– Kreisleriana, op.16Schumann – Fanatasie in C major, op.17
Mitsuko Uchida (piano)
In a well-nigh perfect performance of Mozart’s ‘sonata for beginners’ – how treacherous
that claim! – Mitsuko Uchida gave the impression and not far, I think, from the
reality of utter effacement of the self. This was not anonymity, yet the sense,
however illusory, of unmediated access to the work ‘itself’ could rarely have
been felt more strongly. Come scritto,
certainly; but not just as written, as we know it in the concert hall, or the
parlour, of our imagination. The first movement’s passage work was second to
none, articulation not only true, but a true joy. (How I wished my schoolboy left
hand had permitted me to play a single bar, let alone a single phrase, like
that. Not that my right hand had come so much closer…) ‘Just’ scales for so
much of the development: not at all? The subdominant surprise in the recapitulation
registered with subtle strength, preparing the way for Mozart’s concomitantly
surprising path back ‘home’. The second movement offered similar virtues. Its
transparency is cruel, even by Mozart’s standards, yet that posed, so it
seemed, Uchida no difficulty whatsoever. The music flowed beautifully, its
legato ‘like oil’. And how a chromatic note made all the difference in the
world: so much from what might have looked so little! The turn to the minor
mode evinced no exaggeration, but any degree of honest, even heart-rending
drama. Uchida resisted the common impulse to rush the finale, which received a
reading full of charm, delight, and yes, again, subtlety. Childlike? Perhaps,
but certainly never childish. Mozart’s – Uchida’s too? – second naïveté worked
its magic nevertheless.
The rest of the programme was
devoted to Schumann. First came Kreisleriana.
The opening piece benefited from admirable clarity. Perhaps it might have had a
little more of the tempest to it, a little more flexibility too; nevertheless,
the clearing of the skies still registered – again magically. I found myself
comparing the difference in Mozart’s and Schumann’s use of arpeggios: not as
some abstract distraction from the ‘poetry’, but by putting technical means at
the heart of that poetry. There was greater flexibility in the second movement
and thereafter, its intermezzi contrasting and responding to the opening
material in a finely traced musical arc, as etched by Uchida (and Schumann!)
Brahmsian compositional technique seemed unusually apparent in many of these
movements, yet quite without Brahms’s ‘lateness’. Here was an earlier
Romanticism, and rightly so. A little untidiness in the third and seventh was
ultimately of little import; if anything, it reminded us that this music is not
supposed to be easy to play (not, I hasten to add, that technique should ever
be belittled.) The poise and dignity Uchida showed in the fourth, the whimsy
that yet spoke of something darker in the fifth, and the ambiguity of the
lullaby, intensified by the intrusion of contrasting material, in the sixth:
all were movingly, perceptively portrayed. So too was the concluding movement,
here sounding very much as in Harriet Smith’s programme note description: ‘less
like the end … than the quiet closing of that door, the illicit listener
tiptoeing away.’
The C major Fantasie followed the interval. Uchida’s
first movement opened magisterially – a word overused, but not, I think,
inappropriate here – yet capable of yielding. One always ‘knows’ that this is
one of Schumann’s greatest works; here one undoubtedly felt it too, not least
through the ongoing sense of perpetual development: ‘developing variation’, as
any Schoenbergian would tell you. Here, comparisons with Liszt’s B minor Sonata
seemed fully apposite. So did Schumann’s marking: ‘Durchaus phantastisch und
leidenschaftlich vorzutragen’. Originality and eloquence were to be heard
equally in all three movements: work and performance. The second had a fine,
almost Elgarian swagger to its opening. It was questioned thereafter, again not
unlike Elgar, although it was Chopin who came to mind in the serenity with
which ensuing contrast was sung, likewise in the flickering, even dissolving,
tendencies of Uchida’s left hand. Out of that extraordinary march emerged
mystery and clarity in equal measure, in contest and collaboration. The quiet
dignity with which the musical narrative was constructed, or perhaps better,
constructed itself, brought an intriguing combination of methods with roots in
both Chopin and late Beethoven. As for the Innigkeit
heard and felt: that was entirely Schumann’s own. So were the paths down which
the musical journey led us and its conclusion: they could hardly have been
envisaged, let alone navigated, by anyone else. Uchida reminded us keenly of
that ineffable individuality.
In a similarly exquisite fusion
of process and poetry, she did that too in an encore of breathtaking delicacy
and unerring direction. I guessed (correctly) that it had been by Kurtág. Only
this morning did I find out which piece: Play
with Infinity. Quite.
