Lugansky - Schumann and Chopin, 12 May 2026

Wigmore Hall

Schumann: Kinderszenen, op.15; Humoreske in B-flat major, op.20
Chopin: Preludes, op.28

Nikolai Lugansky (piano)

The first movement from Kinderszenen announced, if a little stiffly, an absorbing recital of Schumann and Chopin from Nikolai Lugansky. We can all, to be fair, take a little time to get going. Thereafter, I had few, if any, reservations concerning playing that combined musical integrity and superlative playing to great effect. Indeed, recalling my previous most recent visit to the same hall, Lugansky’s performance was, if not necessarily superior to, certainly less wilful than Pavel Kolesnikov’s markedly different conception and execution last month. The relationship between pieces penetrated to the heart of opposing forces in Schumann’s music. Dazzling fingerwork in ‘Hasche-Mann’ seemed to enable, even to necessitate, yielding in ‘Bittendes Kind’, which in turn led to greater freedom in ‘Glückes genug’. ‘Träumerei’ dreamed, yet carried on, finely shaped without sounding unduly moulded, instigating an infectious response in ‘Am Kamin, that yet at the outset seemed possessed of an almost Mozartian sadness beneath the surface, albeit soon dispelled. For contrasting characteristics were certainly present within pieces too, as in ‘Ritter vom Steckenpfered’, indeed there almost disturbingly so. Changes of mood and complexity led us seemingly inexorably to ‘Der Dichter spricht’, blessed by touching nobility and considerable poetic depth. 

Humoreske furthered that kaleidoscope of moods, unfurled both within and between movements. The ambiguity of the first, for instance, suggested very much a knife-edge, which could go either way. Ultimately, it was Schumann’s poetic idea, once more, that held things together—an idea, of course, brought into being in performance by Lugansky. That Schumann was a Romantic and Romanticism was above all a literary movement that came to influence and shape other art forms may seem obvious points to make, but they can readily be forgotten; certainly not here, as a parade of characters and narrators made their presence felt. Voicing of lines unlocked many a door, to exultation as well as quandary. The work’s undeniable formal complexity was shown, ultimately, to rest above all upon questions – perhaps answers too – of feeling. 

Chopin’s Preludes followed, again very much a cumulative sequence, the C major opening succinct, laconic, Webern-like in essence if hardly language, a brief-curtain raiser to a further parade of characters, emotions, and more. Lugansky’s A minor Prelude captured beautifully both tension and ultimately marriage between hands: a technical problem (and opportunity) brought to étude-like musical life. Bright, gymnastic, liberated by the keyboard, its G major successor in turn necessitated both sadness and inner strength in its E minor counterpart. We heard and felt Schumannesque flickering in volatility, engrossing tumult, Bachian homage in harmony and counterpoint, and jet-black malevolence (as in the E-flat minor and F minor preludes). There was also plenty of time and space for reflection, the D-flat Prelude – ironically, given its ‘Raindrop’ nickname – clearing the skies magically, only for them to darken again in its ominous middle section, the close nicely ambiguous as to which had won out. If, in the end, blistering, tragic vehemence won out (G minor as well as the final D minor) then memories of much else, as in the Schumann works, persisted. There was no either/or. 

Nor, indeed, was there in three finely contrasted encores, at least taken as a whole. The A-flat ‘Duetto’ Song Without Words brought Mendelssohn closer still to Schumann, Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu no less magical, yet more overtly thrilling. I am not sure I have ever heard the latter better played. Likewise Rachmaninov’s C minor Prelude, op.23 no.7, sounding as the composer’s piano music always should: music for the Steinway.

Horton - Chopin and Ravel, 16 January 2026

Wigmore Hall

Chopin: Nocturne in C minor, op.48 no.1; Nocturne in F-sharp minor, op.48 no.2
Ravel: Valses nobles et sentimentales
Chopin: Scherzo no.1 in B minor; Scherzo no.2 in B-flat minor, op.31; Scherzo no.3 in C-sharp minor, op.39; Scherzo no.4 in E major, op.54

The op.48 Nocturnes, two of Chopin’s greatest, make for an arresting opening to any recital. This, the latest in Tim Horton’s Wigmore Hall series, was no exception. Again, I was struck by the freshly considered nature of the pianist’s interpretations: not so as to be different for the sake of it, but rather with good musical warrant that had me think – and rethink – pieces I thought I knew well. Both outline and detail of the Nocturnes seemed to stem from their ternary (A-B-A) form. The first section of the C minor Nocturne sounded with stronger differentiation than one generally hears between melody and accompaniment, setting up greater contrast both with the beautifully voiced four-part harmony of the middle section and with the newly turbulent accompaniment of the elaborated return, arising from and audibly growing out of both. The F-sharp minor Nocturne offered, naturally, a different relationship between harmony and counterpoint at its opening, again properly contrasted, and with a different, equally convincing synthesis at the close. This may sound simple, indeed dry, in written form, but in performance offered the key to understanding. 

Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales likewise offered ternary form complement and contrast, both in themselves and with respect to Chopin. Rhythmic and harmonic insistence in the first waltz ensured that what followed – not only its immediate successor – could melt and charm, but consequently. Indeed, that sense of the greater whole was a particular strength throughout: these are not pieces to be heard individually, gaining rather from their place in the sequence. Ravel’s emergence from within the spirit and writing of Chopin was clear and meaningful. The tonal interferences to which Jim Samson referred in another excellent programme note – not the least contribution to this series – offered just the right amount of ‘bite’, as we hurtled if not quite to the threshold, then at least in the direction, of La Valse. 

Presenting four Scherzi in a row might be thought of as tempting fate. Would they work better as record than concert programme? Not a bit of it, at least in the right hands, that combination of complement and contrast in (broadly, modified or perhaps better ‘extended’?) ternary form again helping shape their success. Without forcing them into too overt a sense of progression between the four, that sense manifested itself through performance and listening: a quasi-sonata of sorts. Extremity of contrasts in the B minor Scherzo’s opening material set the parameters for what was to come, in a way not so distant from Beethoven. (There are scherzos/scherzi after all, even if without Beethoven’s gruff humour.) Yet for all the Classicism of form, which in any case can readily be exaggerated, there was a parallel, even opposing modernism in the fragmentary nature of certain figures. The trio sang, preparing the way (not unlike the Nocturnes at the beginning) for greater fury in the scherzo’s reprise. A resolute lack of sentimentality – who wants to hear a sentimental scherzo? – carried through into the Second, progressively integrative, again connecting back to the opening Nocturnes, and just a little enigmatic. Generative rhythm – present, even when in abeyance – characterised the Third. Might it have been a little more grandiloquent, in keeping with the Lisztian boldness of its opening? Perhaps, but there is no one ‘right’ way in such music, and this offered its own rewards. The turn from minor keys to E major for the Fourth Scherzo maintained impeccable line that took us in new directions, whilst nicely concluding those preceding. Structural integrity underlay keyboard wizardry and poetic expression alike.

Gerstein - Liszt and Brahms, 7 January 2026

 Wigmore Hall

Liszt: Three Petrarch Sonnets, S 158; Années de pèlerinage, Deuxième année: Italie: ‘Après une lecture du Dante’, S 161/7
Brahms: Scherzo in E-flat minor, op.4; Piano Sonata no.3 in F major, op.5

Kirill Gerstein (piano)  

Kirill Gerstein’s visits to the Wigmore Hall are fast becoming – for many, have fast become – highlights of its season. His captivating Busoni series was certainly that. Ringing in a New Year, more or less, with Brahms and Liszt was no less impressive, technically or poetically. Indeed, as with all the best performances of such music, to distinguish between technique and poetry would have been complete to miss the point. 

The first half was Liszt’s: the three Petrarch Sonnets and the ‘Dante’ Sonata. A splendid opening flourish signalled the pianist’s arrival, response coming in held-back, almost laid-back fashion: quasi-improvisatory, as if we were invited to an exclusive salon concert in which the composer-pianist were to treat us to his paraphrases. Fresh yet considered, it sang beautifully, as did the others. They emerged as kindred spirits, yet with very much their own characters and souls. The second was similarly bold and convincing in its rhetoric, with a ravishing core, its climaxes still more exultant. Synthesising and extending qualities from both, the third could be heard almost as another face of the same mountain. Romantic freedom, eloquence, and rapture, but also rigour held the audience in the performer’s – and composer’s – hand. Perhaps the penultimate note was hit a touch too hard for the closing sigh, but really that only showed the performer to be human. 

At the beginning of 2026, most of us have long abandoned all hope, yet still we entered the Dante-Liszt Inferno. Here, the opening was, if anything, still more declamatory: as befits the subject, one might say. Detail, structure, and expressive content were inextricably related in the immediacy of the moment, the narrative as vivid as in any symphonic poem, only here with the added white heat of pianistic virtuosity. Underlying pulse was rock-solid, permitting great freedom in its variation. The story was not only told but felt—and what a story it is. 

Brahms’s E-flat minor Scherzo, op.4, is not his most characteristic work, though it was interesting to hear something akin to his more mature voice coming through, just as it might have done when the composer introduced it to Liszt in 1853, two years after its composition. Gerstein’s performance took its leave, as does Brahms, from Beethoven in propulsion and Schumann in occasional parenthesis, Brahms as ‘Brahms’ emerging from within in muscular energy that yet preserved space for poetic rumination. Here, undoubtedly, was a Classicist in Romantic clothing—though never formulaically so. 

The Third Piano Sonata, itself dating from 1853, underlined Brahms’s difference from Liszt, also coming as a kindred spirit to the Scherzo. If the mature voice were still only intermittent, Gerstein certainly brought it out when he could, in a performance of the first movement that at times seemed already to look forward to the First Piano Concerto. Its contours were traced with fidelity and illumination, as were those of the following Andante espressivo. Its shadow seemed to fall further into the future, although there was plenty of Schumannesque Innigkeit to savour too. The Scherzo, like its solitary predecessor, was both pianistic and straining towards the orchestral, sprung rhythms key to that combination. The Intermezzo united tendencies from both second and third movements, settling with greater simplicity than the second in a darkly compelling reading. Equally compelling was the finale, its relative complexity never eclipsing clarity of trajectory. Gerstein proved a sure guide in what can often prove highly treacherous terrain. That it ended with just a touch of well-judged, Lisztian grandiloquence was both meet and right. Schumann’s Blumenstück tied together various threads as a substantial encore, beautifully voiced, with Chopin’s A-flat major Waltz, op.42, a delightful, generous response.

 

Horton - Chopin and Bach, 29 October 2025

Wigmore Hall

Chopin: Prelude in C-sharp minor, op.45
Bach: English Suite no.2 in A minor, BWV 807
Chopin: Waltz in A minor, op.34 no.2; Fantasy in F minor, op.49; Polonaise in C-sharp minor, op.26 no.1; Polonaise in E-flat minor, op.26 no.2; Mazurka in B major, op.63 no.1; Mazurka in F minor, op.63 no.2; Mazurka in C-sharp minor, op.63 no.3; Polonaise-fantaisie in A-flat major, op.61

Tim Horton (piano)

Tim Horton’s Wigmore Hall residency, in which he presents Chopin’s music alongside important predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, has reached Bach, offering the second English Suite and an illuminating Chopin selection. The C-sharp minor Prelude – Chopin’s, not Bach’s – opened and proceeded in a way that set the tone for the entire recital: both muscular and melting, clarity and direction likewise two sides to the same musical coin. The notes mattered, and one felt that; so too did Chopin’s harmonic surprises. Not for the last time here, without necessarily sounding Lisztian, the playing made one keen to hear Horton’s Liszt. At the opposite end of the first half, the A minor Waltz, op.34 no.2, explored its tonality with a sadness emerging from its material, rather than applied to it, and thus all the stronger for it. Rubato here, as elsewhere, was unexaggerated yet telling. Chopin’s harmonic transformations and much else stood in Bach’s line, whilst remaining ineffably the composer’s own. 

In between came the English Suite, its A minor presaging the Waltz. This was not Chopinesque Bach as such; it had its own validity. It was, though, a validity that drew connections and created a properly satisfying musical programme, reminding us that Bach’s may be the greatest piano music of all (with absolutely no apology to devotees of other keyboard instruments). The Prelude, rhythms tightly sprung, offered a fine framework for melodic and harmonic exploration and expression, striking an excellent balance between dynamic contrasts that were of the moment and structurally conceived, in fact showing the distinction ultimately to be illusory. Following its relative extraversion, the Allemande turned inwards, again relatively speaking, leading to a Courante that was both robust and subtle, its lineage unmistakeably French, albeit with equally unmistakeable German colouring and grounding. A beautifully dignified, even luxuriant Sarabande led us into the harmonic labyrinth, but also guided us through it. The Bourrées and Gigue offered both intensification and release, just as they should. 

The F minor Fantasy, op.49, opened the second half, inheriting and extending the recital’s preceding virtues, whilst delineating this piece’s decidedly particular character and form. Echoes of Schumann, however fleeting, registered clearly in a musical kaleidoscope that again, if not exactly Lisztian, was not exactly un-Lisztian either. This music can readily fall apart when presented according to pre-conceived structural ideas that are not Chopin’s; not so here, quite the contrary. The two op.26 Polonaises and the were eloquently presented in relation to one another, harmonic foundations key to that conception. The anger and grief of the latter, in E-flat minor, spoke with a sensibility it was difficult not to think tragic, albeit finely differentiated. (But then, is not Hamlet?) I found it deeply moving. 

So too were the three op.63 Mazurkas, similarly conceived as a set, yet ever alert to individual qualities. A particularly Chopinesque sadness to the second contrasted with and in its way confirmed both the well-sprung first and the syncretic, unifying qualities of the third. Counterpoint and harmony, as with Bach, were indivisible. The Polonaise-fantaisie is not my favourite Chopin, but this attentively painted performance had me listen and, I fancied, understand its structure as rarely before. Unfailingly eloquent, it unfolded both on its own terms and in light of what had gone before. As Jim Samson points out in his typically excellent programme note, examination of Chopin’s sketches shows that Chopin was ‘really composing a Fantasy, similar in conception and even in tonal organisation to the other Fantasy performed thius evening, and that he added the polonaise rhythm … to the principal melody as an afterthought.’ Compositional origins sounded here with musical immanence. As an encore, we heard a characteristic op.9 no.2 Nocturne, direct and sensitive in equal measure. Once again, I look forward to future instalments in this fascinating series.

Horton - Schumann, Stockhausen, and Chopin, 17 June 2025

Wigmore Hall

Schumann: Piano Sonata no.1 in F-sharp minor, op.11
Stockhausen: Klavierstück VII
Chopin: Nocturne in C-sharp minor, op.27 no.1; Nocturne in D-flat major, op.27 no.2; Mazurka in A minor, op.59 no.1; Mazurka in A-flat major, op.59 no.2; Mazurka in F-sharp minor, op.59 no.3; Piano Sonata no.3 in B minor, op.58

Tim Horton (piano) 

Dedicated to the memory of Alfred Brendel, whose death had been announced earlier that day, this latest instalment in Tim Horton’s Wigmore Hall Chopin series offered a programme which Brendel might not have given but of which he would surely have approved. It opened with Schumann’s early F-sharp minor sonata, described in Jim Samson’s excellent programme note as ‘immensely challenging’. Indeed, seems the appropriate response: certainly for the pianist but also, I think, for the listener—or at least this one. Know and love much of Schumann’s piano music as I do, this work I struggle with. Often one needs to wait for such music to knock on the door, which it has yet to do for me. Horton, though, gave a commanding account, properly ‘orchestral’, though unquestionably written for the instrument to hand. The strange ‘Introduzione’ to the first movement, turbulent yet controlled, was given with a sort of tragic dignity that already spoke of affinity with Chopin, as did more ruminative passages later on. Schumann’s unusual conception of sonata form here was given its due: communicated rather than ‘explained’. The ‘Aria’ came initially as Eusebian relief, soon complicated to an almost Brahmsian degree: all over far too quickly, leaving one longing for more. Infectious energy characterised the scherzo, duly balanced by its trio, prior to quasi-Beethovenian struggle in a finale whose range of colour could not help but impress. the ascent to final climax finely prepared and achieved. 

I suspect I may have been in a minority in the audience in finding Stockhausen’s Klavierstück VII less challenging; yet perhaps not, given Horton’s vividly communicative, comprehending performance. It captured both what (as with almost any piece) is ‘of its time’ and what has enabled it to endure as key work in the piano literature. Attack, duration, all parameters were inextricably connected in a ravishing poetic vision of piano resonance and overtones. One could not help but listen in a different, moment-oriented way; one likewise could not help but be rewarded for doing so. 

The second half was given over to Chopin. The pair of op.27 Nocturnes complemented each other beautifully, independence of hands explored in different ways in both. Both were finely shaped, evidently conceived in single, long, ever-varying breaths. Telling rubato made its point without distracting. Both sounded as miniature tone poems: surely what they are. The three op.59 Mazurkas worked equally well as a set and as individual pieces, a fine lilt to the first ushering them on their way. What rhythmic and harmonic subtleties there are here, and what subtle yet unmistakeable pride, which latter quality also helped usher in the Third Piano Sonata. The first movement’s originality may be less startling than that of its counterpart in the Second Sonata, but it was nonetheless palpable in a performance that unfolded with all the time in the world: certainly not slow, yet equally neither hurried nor harried. Will-o’-the-wisp fluttering of the scherzo, turned on its head in the trio, prepared us more in contrast than kinship for the darkness that born in harmony and harmonic rhythm for the slow movement. The fantasia-like quality Horton brought to the finale both surprised and crowned, in a sense presaging similar qualities in the encore, the F-sharp major Nocturne, op.15 no.2, whose tonality also connected us to the close of the Schumann sonata. I look forward to the continuation of this fascinating series.

 

Lortie - Chopin, 27 February 2025

Barbican Hall

Études, op.10
Trois Nouvelles Études, B130
Études, op.25

Louis Lortie (piano)  

I do not think I had previously heard all of Chopin’s piano studies given on a single evening. Fortunately, Louis Lortie’s recital was not one of those occasions on which one ends up thinking that might have made more sense as a CD than a concert programme; there is certainly much to be gained by hearing the works together, not only the two celebrated sets, but also the Trois Nouvelles Études written in 1839 as a contribution to Ignaz Moscheles and François-Joseph Fétis’s Méthode des méthodes de piano. It is not unusual in a piano recital to feel that the music following the interval flows more freely; if that was the case here, that is not to say that the first half was without interest, far from it. And whatever quibbles one might have – there will always be something – there is something heroic to the very attempt, let alone to its navigation with such success. 

Indeed, Lortie’s way with the op.10 Études was in some ways surprising. Often, the technical difficulties underlying the idea of a study came across more strongly than usual as essence as opposed to mere starting-point. In the opening C major piece, fingerwork and basic figuration very much were the music material. In the F major Étude, all was generated from tightly sprung rhythms. Voice-leading very much did its work in the E-flat major and minor studies. There was a keen sense of progression too, the C-sharp minor study vehement, torrential even, and notably proceeding from its two immediate predecessors. That is not to say there was not lyricism, as for instance in the E major study, given not without rubato yet enough simplicity; but even there, the technical ‘point’ of the piece shone through. Whether the balance tilted too much in that direction is doubtless in part a matter of taste, though for me sometimes it did. I certainly felt the loss of subjectivity in the ‘Revolutionary’ Study, an odd anti-climax whose detachment felt at odds with ‘problem’ and material alike. 

The three Nouvelles Études seemed to strike a better overall balance, as did the op.25 set. In the former, Scarlatti’s ‘ingenious jesting with art’ came to mind, Lortie uncommonly successful even among great pianists in transforming the ‘problem’ into music from the outset. The first in particular can readily sound more an ‘exercise’ than anything else, but here was deeply involving; as, in its necessarily lighter way, was the second. The A-flat major opening study of op.25 built and sang, its trajectory beautifully plotted. Slightly odd hesitations in the second piece of the op.10 set were nowhere to be heard in the long line of its counterpart here, whilst the richness of texture in the succeeding F major study proved duly engrossing. Technical demands were not banished, but there was a more consistent, conventional sense of these as miniature tone poems proceeding from a technical question: nowhere more so than in the G-sharp minor Étude. A delectable G-flat major Étude dug just deep enough. The concluding C minor piece of this set worked considerably better to my ears as a conclusion than its counterpart prior to the interval, very much a profound utterance of the soul. 

The first encore – alas, I missed the second – a generous G minor Ballade, was oddly dream-like: not necessarily how I think of it, but successfully reimagined on Lortie’s own terms. This was, then, anything but a run-of-the-mill Chopin recital. I was often thrilled and, even where slightly puzzled, found myself at least intrigued.

Horton - Debussy and Chopin, 11 December 2024

Wigmore Hall

Debussy: Préludes, Book II
Chopin: 24 Preludes, op.28

Tim Horton (piano)

With this recital of Debussy and Chopin, Tim Horton opened a Wigmore Hall series in which he will present various works by Chopin with music that influenced him and on which he in turn came to influence. It would always be a fitting thing to do, so long as well done, yet somehow it seems all the more so as the musical world continues to mourn the loss of Maurizio Pollini. ‘At seven,’ Horton writes in an intelligent, engaging introduction to the series, ‘my parents bought me Maurizio Pollini’s astonishing account of the Études. I could not believe that the piano could be played, or written for, like this. My obsession with music, the piano, and Chopin has lasted to this day.’ Indeed, with a series encompassing Bach, Mozart, Schumann, Debussy, Ravel, Szymanowski and Stockhausen, Pollini’s ghost might seem more than usually apparent. Once, he spoke of recording Gaspard de la nuit – imagine! – and Szymanowski was said to be a composer he played in private, though never, I think, in public. The others, Chopin too, featured alongside other composers in the five-concert Royal Festival Hall Pollini Project of 2011. Yet this recital in no sense imitated, nor even evidently paid homage: it announced a major voice in its own right, one with interesting and instructive things to say about and with this music, which I hope to follow in subsequent instalments.

Debussy came first, in the guise of the second book of Préludes, whose sense of a whole, tonal centres notwithstanding, was uncommonly apparent, as if the heir to an early keyboard suite. ‘Brouillards’ announced a number of oppositions and relationships that would persist and transform throughout the set and arguably the recital as a whole. Melting and muscular, the performance showed that atmosphere and precision were far from opposed, but rather mutually dependent. Clarity of thought was paramount and rightly so. Harmonic rhythm and rhythm more generally, sprung yet with telling rubato, played a guiding role in ‘Feuilles mortes’. ‘La puerta del Vino’ intrigued: darker and more dangerous than I recalled, at times verging on the brutal, yet certainly not without charm. Escamillo turned ‘impressionist’, one might say, not unlike the later ‘Général Lavine – eccentric’. There was likewise nothing fey to the fairies in ‘Les fées sont d'exquises danseuses’. Their light shone brought and colourful rather than flickering. I liked the way Horton’s performance of ‘Bruyères’ drew us in to greater intimacy at its heart, again without sacrifice to colour. 

Moonlight pervaded, as surely it must, ‘La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune’, yet there was great musical clarity in and beneath its rays. The same might be said for the waves of ‘Ondine’ and the being they enveloped. Grandiloquent yet affectionate, Debussy’s homage to Mr Pickwick, was admirable here in its clarity, harmonic progressions clearly generative. In some ways, it seemed to prefigure greater abstraction not only to the opening of ‘Les tierces alternées’, but also ‘Canope’ in between. Any false opposition between ‘poetry’ and ‘construction’ was rendered redundant; indeed, the former might well have had a more ‘poetic’ title of its own. The closing ‘Feux d’artifice’, music lying between as in the notes, painted a resplendent picture and climax. 

Hearing Chopin’s twenty-four Preludes after the interval retrospectively brought influence and affinity to bear on our experience. Again, there was great clarity throughout, not only in presentation of the notes but in demonstrating why they were where they were and how. In general, they were possessed with singularity of idea, not so very different from some of the Etudes, whether in the lightly worn yet expressive virtuosity of one sequence of minor-key pieces, or the sadness of some of its predecessors (E minor and B minor, for instance, the latter sharing elements of character with some of the sadder Mazurkas). Expressive qualities arose from the material rather than being imposed on it, the tumult of the E-flat minor Prelude seeming to be summoned by the piano keys themselves. The serene charm of the ‘Raindrop’, in D-flat, and its A-flat companion had them emerge as miniature tone poems, as with all the pieces heard and expressed as if in a single, variegated breath. The simple nobility of the C minor Prelude, movingly shaded, contrasted with an almost Brahmsian, dark-hued passion to the next-but-one in G minor, which in turn immediately contrasted with a leggiero F major, and finally Romantic turbulence and aristocratic pride in D minor. As in all the finest accounts of this book, Pollini’s included, tonal and expressive journeys were as one.

R.I.P. Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024)

(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

Maurizio Pollini was a guiding light of my musical life: which is to say, he and his music-making were with me from the moment in my teens when I became seriously interested in music. More, composers and performers alike, are gone now than remain with us; I shall not tempt fate by naming those who are left. One of my very first cassette purchases – it may even have been the first – was his recording of Mozart’s Piano Concertos nos 19 and 23 with Karl Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic. I love it more than I can say. Mozart’s music requires but one thing: perfection. Perfection it receives in what, I suspect, will always be one of my Desert Island Discs. 

In my first London concert, a Prom for which I took the bus up to London and back to Sheffield for a birthday treat with a friend, Pollini was the soloist, again in Mozart, this time in the C minor Concerto, no.24. It was also my first live Schoenberg and Stravinsky (the First Chamber Symphony and Pulcinella, with the CBSO conducted by Simon Rattle). And then, when, as a student, I bought my first ticket for a London piano recital, now taking a return rail journey from Cambridge, it was Pollini: in his beloved Chopin, which by now I knew well enough from recordings, above all those ever-astounding Études and Préludes. What it was, though, to hear him live, as I sat on the Royal Festival Hall stage, incredibly close to the master and his instrument. The technique was of course dazzling, Pollini’s pristine perfection taken by duller souls for a lack of depth or some other such nonsense. I read review after review in which the musical equivalent of the nouveaux riches would lament his technical ability, failing to realise that, like that of any great musician, it was in the service of a musical performance that would have been nothing without it. By now, of course, I knew among other recorded performances that simply astounding DG Originals CD, bringing together two original recordings, of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Webern, and Boulez.

 

Prokofiev and Stravinsky were no longer in his repertory by the time I heard him, but both the Webern (Variations, op.27) and Boulez (Piano Sonata no.2) I would hear live more than once. One of those occasions combined the two, in a 2006 recital at the Salzburg Festival. It had been advertised, somewhat surprisingly, as an all-Mozart recital, but then it was the composer’s 250^th anniversary year. I had longed to hear him in solo Mozart – none of which, so far as I am aware, he recorded – and so I did, in the first half. The second half of the programme, though, he changed to Webern and Boulez, initiating an exodus not only at the interval, not only after the Webern, but unforgivably, during the ice, fire, and elements unknown to this universe of the Boulez. I might have thought I could not admire him any more than I did already; now, however, I did. 

There was so much else, of course, not least the music of Luigi Nono, some of which, quite simply, would not have existed had it not been for his friendship with Pollini (and Claudio Abbado). …sofferte onde serene… I knew it a little from his recording, but to hear it live in London at the Southbank Centre’s courageous ‘Fragments of Venice’ festival in 2007, was truly to hear it for the first time. The last time I did so, at Salzburg in 2019, it was like welcoming an old friend, albeit one who could shock and surprise, as well as seduce, as brilliantly as you could imagine—and then some.

It was an important concert for me in another way too: the first time I had written a programme essay for a Pollini concert. I have no idea whether he would have read it; I am sure he had 1001 better things to do with his time, but a little part of me hopes that he might have done and not found it hopelessly inadequate. (It is perhaps best that I shall never know.) I should like, if I may, to quote the Nono part of that note, not for any intrinsic worth, but simply because in some way, that felt for me to be a moment at which I came closer to Pollini.

 

Such serenity provides both starting point and goal for the poetic idea of Luigi Nono’s 1976 …sofferte onde serene…. The waves are Venetian, so too is the tolling of bells, almost as if transposed from the Vienna of Schoenberg’s op.19 no.6 [heard immediately before]. Heard, felt and answered from Nono’s home on the Giudecca, those sounds seem, as with Schoenberg’s, not only to say farewell to earlier, angrier compositional and aesthetic tendencies – tendencies that had culminated for Nono in the high-watermark of his politically committed art, the opera Al gran sole carico d’amore – but also to sustain them in distillation, in further development. ‘I could say’, Nono remarked, ‘as Schoenberg did, that, at the conclusion of each work, I wish more than ever to breathe the air of new planets’. It also continued Nono’s artistic collaboration with Pollini, initiated by Como un ola de fuerza y luz (1971–2), although the two leftist musicians had known each other since the mid-1960s. …sofferte onde serene… displayed, as Nono averred, a reduction in the multiplicity of musical material: a new path taken following a period of compositional silence.

 

That apparent simplification in itself inspired further ‘waves’ – lagoonal and sonic – in collaboration enshrined at the work’s heart, Nono’s purpose amplification rather than counterpoint. Dedicated to Maurizio and Marilisa Pollini, it operates on two acoustic planes: Pollini live and on tape. They merge, realized in the air through artistry of sound direction – first Nono himself; tonight, André Richard. Vibrations, shadows and resonances sustain and transform memories of loss suffered by composer and pianist. Ghosts of other sounds and works in Pollini’s repertoire are honoured and transformed. (Late, Venetian-themed works by Liszt, La lugubre gondola and R.W. Venezia, were performed at the 1977 premiere.) The moment of Schoenbergian hyper-expressivity – sometimes stark, sometimes on the edge of audibility, sometimes even falling into silence –compels active listening. Nono’s politics have not drowned; they are revealed anew in the waters. So as not to confuse the political ‘provocations’ for earlier works with their substance, we must listen, suffering to break musical silence as the composer did, inspired by his pianist and friend as much as by the instrument. Counterpoint and conflict seem conspicuous by their absence, certainly by comparison to Nono’s preceding works. Whether we feel that absence as an integral aspect of the work is an impossible yet necessary question.

Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono

 

I could list fond memories aplenty: from the time when Pollini played those Schoenberg op.19 Six Little Piano Pieces as a single encore, one of four, to the five-concert ‘Pollini Project’ series at the Festival Hall, which took us literally from Bach to Boulez. A good number of them will be found on my blog in any case, under the Maurizio Pollini tag. There was the Bauhaus, crystalline surface-perfection of his recording of the op.25 Schoenberg Suite for piano, teeming with energy below, and the Orphic taming of the Furies in the Beethoven Fourth Concerto with Böhm. There were Stockhausen and Sciarrino, Schubert, and Schumann. I should at least mention the transition, or so it seemed, to a ‘late Pollini’, in which the technique was not quite so unwaveringly infallible as once it had been, though it certainly remained (until very late) present. Many felt a greater depth, almost as compensation. I know what they meant, but I think it was an illusion: the same old illusion that meant, dazzled and in some curious cases repelled by technique, they had never heard that depth in the first place now led them to hear it more strongly. There was, though, an instructive and touching element of humanity to the ageing process that came to us listeners as much as to the performer. 

Amidst such reminiscences, the communist Pollini’s unwavering political commitment should not be forgotten. It informed his performance as much as it did the compositional work of Nono—or Beethoven. Advocacy of Nono’s music took him and as Abbado beyond the concert hall and the opera house to the car factories of northern Italy. It would have been easier to glory in the world of ‘star performers’, but that was clearly never somewhere Pollini, however fêted, was ever at home. In many ways, his music-making was always a product of the ‘Years of Lead’ in which fascism, openly backed by much of ‘the West’, threatened to occupy much of Europe once again. Speaking in Bettina Erhardt’s wonderful film on Nono, A Trail on the Water, made after Nono’s death, Pollini recalled one incident in particular:

 

There was a lot of tension in the air. We have to remember the situation in Italy back then. People were even talking about a possible Fascist coup. There was the example of the colonels in Greece. The fear of a turn towards authoritarianism was serious. After the massacre on the Piazza Fontana in Milan and the bombs, we took it all the more seriously. I think it was the reaction of the whole country that kept it from happening. Back then, I once read, or rather tried to read, a declaration against a hideous atrocity in the Vietnam War when the United States bombed Hanoi and Hai Phong. Several Italian musicians had signed the declaration: Claudio Abbado, Luigi Nono, [Giacomo] Manzoni and the Quartetto Italiano, as well as Goffredo Petrassi, Luigi Dallapiccola. Contrary to all my expectations, at the mere sound of the word ‘Vietnam’, the audience exploded in a kind of collective delirium, which made it impossible to continue my recital. I made several attempts to read this short statement. This was interrupted by the arrival of the police. Eventually the piano was closed and that was that.

He spoke at the protests against Berlusconi almost half a century later too. Maurizio Pollini was a great pianist, a great musician, but above all a great man, a great human being. However unfashionable it may be to say so, for me that shows in his music-making. In recorded form, as in our memories, that will live forever. And we shall be able to tell those younger than ourselves: ‘I heard Pollini.’

Pollini - Schumann and Chopin, 23 June 2023

Royal Festival Hall

Schumann: Arabesque in C major, op.18; Fantasie in C major, op.17
Chopin: Mazurka in C minor, op.56 no.3; Barcarolle in F-sharp major, op,60; Scherzo no.1 in B minor, op.20

Maurizio Pollini (piano)

 

‘Who is the world’s greatest pianist?’ is a silly question, although human beings have long been prone to ask and indeed to answer silly questions. So long as it remains at the level of the parlour game, it probably does no great harm, though it is unlikely ever to illuminate either. For more than half a century though, Maurizio Pollini has stood as one of the world’s greatest: not merely, or even principally, from the standpoint of technique, awe-inspiring as that long was, but as a musician of penetrating intelligence and insights, committed equally to classical and new repertory. Whether in Beethoven or Boulez, Chopin or Stockhausen, Pollini at his best might occasionally be equalled, yet, allowing for vagaries of taste and opinion, never surpassed. 

More recently, that fabled technique, out of which were born and formed performances of white-hot intensity, has proved more fallible. It has sometimes taken Pollini a little time to ‘get going’ in a recital, though the second half and encores have at least tended to show him still at his best. This Festival Hall appearance, postponed from earlier in the year, offered uncomfortable listening – and viewing – yet ultimately proved a triumph of the human spirit, one that involved audience warmth, involvement, and encouragement too. There were flashes and sometimes more than that of the younger musician alongside the memory lapses. As we progressed towards the end of the recital, aided now by sheet music and a page turner, Pollini showed something far more valuable than the sort of interchangeable, note-perfect feat of virtuoso execution one might hear from some. For those of us who have grown up with him, it was an evening of very mixed emotions, but it was ultimately a chance to remember the journey we have taken with him, how much we have learned from it, and how much we shall continue to do so.

Schumann’s Arabeske suggested Bach led in new clothes into the age of Romanticism. The whiteness of C major sounded pristine, rare, and yet far from vulnerable, possessed of a strength belying so much. Florestan and Eusebius presented themselves and did varied battle throughout the work’s episodes and return. The epilogue in particular was truly touching: light yet decisive in piercing of the heart. The Fantasie opened with a sense of its greater scale and ambition, reference seemingly made as much to the venerable history of the keyboard fantasia as to Schumann’s more obvious points of closer reference. There were passages of high Romantic vehemence when poise returned, though ultimately a performance of the whole was not to be. That setbacks had neither pianist nor audience give up, though, was something in which to take solace and always to remember. 

A plain-spoken Chopin Mazurka in C minor opened the second half, sadness seeping through as it must. Repeated rhythms and chromatic inflections took on greater, metaphysical meaning in context. In the Barcarolle, the waters rose once again, the gondola took flight, and surveyed familiar yet ever-strange landscapes, perhaps for the last time. One never knows—and for that reason should always make the most of what one has. The B minor Scherzo presented tumultuous flashes of old: in part muscle memory, doubtless, for there will always be something of that in any performance. But it was not only that; anger, tenderness, and more came to the surface via a cantilena that was unquestionably the real thing.

Debargue - Scarlatti, Chopin, and Alkan, 22 June 2023

Wigmore Hall

Scarlatti: Sonatas in A major, Kk208 and Kk24; in D major, Kk491; in D minor, Kk141
Chopin: Ballade no.2 in F major; Prelude in C-sharp minor, op.45; Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat major, op.61
Alkan: Concerto pour piano seul, op.39 no.8: ‘Allegro assai’

Lucas Debargue (piano)

Lucas Debargue has built a considerable reputation, both as pianist and composer, over the past few years. I have yet to hear his own music and this was my first encounter with him as pianist. Much in the first half of this Wigmore Hall recital, devoted to Scarlatti and Chopin, puzzled me, though a large audience reacted with great enthusiasm. It was in Alkan that he seemed most at home to me; or perhaps I should say it was with his Alkan that I felt most at home. For knowing now that Debargue is a composer as well as a performer, my sense that much of the Scarlatti and Chopin edged towards paraphrases, albeit using (almost) all the notes provided, on original works rather than performances of the works ‘themselves’ makes more sense. There is room for many approaches to repertoire and performance, and the polite, disarming way Debargue spoke, at the beginning of the second half, concerning Alkan left one in no doubt concerning his sincerity and dedication.

The four Scarlatti sonatas with which the programme began can rarely – no, never – have sounded like this from any other performer, regardless of instrument. I was intrigued by the beginning of Kk208: it sounded pristine, if often bizarrely deliberate. A sudden crescendo and quick withdrawal of that extra volume offered contrast, even if I struggled to understand why. It was pianistic and rhetorical, to the degree of well-nigh Chopinesque eruption in the bass, if not in a vein anyone might have expected. Its A major companion, Kk24, provided frenetic contrast, until falling into reverie. What I missed above all was harmonic rhythm, often indeed simple rhythm, but perhaps I was missing the point. Kk491 in D major was still highly inflected, though more recognisable and with greater momentum. There was no doubting the beauty of Debargue’s touch here, whether with utmost delicacy or fullness of tone in Scarlatti’s Iberian strumming of guitars. If Kk141 at times sounded more like Liszt or Bartók, there is nothing necessarily wrong with that; all three composers were poets of their instrument, clearly an aesthetic that appeals to Debargue as creative, as much as re-creative, artist. I wished it had settled, just once, so that I could have a sense of where it was going and where it had come from, but again perhaps that was the point. Mahan Esfahani’s immersive harpsichord recital at the Queen Elizabeth Hall last autumn seemed to me far closer to performance of the works, without in any sense inhibiting interpretative freedom. Likewise Tamara Stefanovich on the piano earlier last year. But as I said, there is room for many. 

Chopin’s Second Ballade began with a greater sense (to my ears, at least) of line, although soon it also began to sound all too manipulated for manipulation’s sake. The idea of letting musical works speak ‘for themselves’ may be a chimera; it may be an undesirable chimera at that. It came to my mind more often, nevertheless, than I might have wished. The C-sharp minor Prelude, op.45, still seemed listless or dreamlike, according to taste, but line was stronger again, as if this were a dark, yet moonlit improvisation. This I could certainly admire, even if it is not remotely how I hear it. With the Polonaise-Fantaisie, there was an undeniable fascination to what Debargue did with it, but a strangely distended reading, whatever the pianist’s evident conviction, left me bewildered. 

The first movement of Alkan’s Concerto pour piano seul, a work I confess to knowing far less well, seemed to me to be played much ‘straighter’ and came as relief. Debargue’s careful-yet-not-too-careful distinction between ‘solo’ and ‘tutti’ helped prepare our ears and minds. More to the point, there was always a sense of where the music had come from and where it might be heading. It was, I think, a more ‘Classical’ as well as ‘classical’ reading and far more to both my taste and understanding. Debargue cared for both the formal outline but also the details that contributed to that outline. He also offered a far more varied palette, and much greater variegation of touch and tone. At last, I felt, here was musical development as I (Teutonically?) understood it. Ultimately, this turned out to be a Berlioz-like Romanticism, albeit for the piano, which worked very well. 

As for the first half, I can well imagine Debargue’s approach appealing more to devotees of, say, Ivo Pogorelich and Khatia Buniatisvili than it did to me, though this seemed far less an ‘act’ than that of either. Even when I did not like and/or understand what I heard, it made me think—and there are worse things that. The encore, Miłosz Magin’s Nostalgie du pays, proved simple yet piquant, a loving contrast to what had gone before.

Roger Peltzman, Dedication, 9 June 2023

Marylebone Theatre

Roger Peltzman’s one-man show Dedication is at once a memorial to family murdered in the Holocaust; a reflection on trauma, both that of his mother, who escaped occupied Belgium, disguised as a nun, and his own, of the New York second generation; and a suggestion of how music might help, if never to heal things that are by their nature unhealable, then to live with them. That, I think, is Peltzman’s personal claim; it has helped him or at least been his companion. He rightly does not make claims to universality; a post-Holocaust world has, quite understandably, felt it cannot and/or should not. This is a personal testimony and all the more moving – and stronger – for that.

It is also, of course, a performance: an idea and reality that frame all that we see and hear, and yet which also offer different ways in for different audiences. Dialogue across the decades with the uncle he never knew, pianist and Chopin specialist Norbert Stern, becomes increasingly the focus—or at least it did for me. It moved Peltzman himself to study the piano and ultimately to make a Chopin recording, partly relived onstage in the here and now, in the Brussels hall in which Norbert had triumphed. There is, both he and his teacher were convinced, a passage in which Peltzman’s performance so takes wing that it ceases to be him and becomes Norbert. Of that they were convinced independently. Following that epiphany, we move to filmed footage of the laying down of Brussels Stolpersteine, in Peltzman’s presence, publicly to commemorate the Stern family. We can, of course, never share Peltzman’s trauma, yet perhaps we can begin to understand it—and even begin to understand traumas of our own.

There was no doubting the varied ways it had affected audience members the evening I attended: this is an hour to have one smile, cry, and think, probably at the same time.

Guy - Chopin, Murail, and Beethoven, 3 October 2022

Wigmore Hall

Chopin: Nocturne in C minor, op.48 no.1, Ballade no.1 in G minor, op.23, Piano Sonata no.3 in B minor, op.58
Tristan Murail: Impression, soleil levant
Beethoven: Piano Sonata no.32 in C minor, op.111

François-Frédéric Guy (piano)

In this Wigmore Hall recital, François-Frédéric Guy took a fresh look at well-known piano masterpieces, and presented a work new this year, written for him by Tristan Murail. Dedicated to the memory of two close friends, Nicholas Angelich and Lars Vogt, it was an interesting concert in the best sense, with nothing taken as read and much to have one think. 

The first half was dedicated to Chopin, opening with the C minor Nocturne, op.48 no.1. Guy married harmony to rhythm in its first section, immediately conveying a sense of the inexorable. Dignified, never remotely sentimental, it both prepared the way for and necessitated contrast in an ever-broadening middle section, which in turn resulted in a modified return that evoked the spirit rather than the letter of synthesis. The G minor Ballade, both grandly rhetorical and intimate in its whispered confidences, evinced kinship with the Nocturne, whilst emerging free of evident relation to any particular pianistic tradition. Again, it was resolutely sentimental, even to the point at which I should not have minded a little old world charm; but this was not an old world performance, and why should it be? It spoke and increasingly sang with an integrity, fire, and miraculous concision that were its own: more important than being note-perfect. 

The B minor Sonata began with a directness difficult not to think of as ‘Beethovenian’, though naturally soon proceeded in a different direction. The first movement reminded me at times of Liszt, and not only (I think) on account of the key. Not that it was especially seductive; this was, if anything, a performance notable for its lack of perfume. Paradoxically, one had to listen for its lyricism; yet, when one did, it was there. Likewise in the scherzo, though perhaps less surprisingly there: it sounded as if a piece of post-impressionist play with light on water—sometimes quite troubled water. A forthright ‘Largo’ led to a marauder icy even in heat of a finale. Much was unexpected, yet never did it sound unreasonable. Guy had one listen.

Murail’s Impression, soleil levant seemed, especially in the context of such performances, more preoccupied with the nature of sound: in general, and piano sound in particular. More flexible, even melting, both inside the piano and on its keys, it nonetheless had melodic lines sound as if taken from Chopin and placed in radically new harmonic context. Occasionally, the ghost of Debussy rattled its chains, but the way of hearing encouraged was different. This seemed to me a commanding performance, even on a first hearing (for me) presenting the work as it should. 

Finally, we heard Beethoven’s last piano sonata, op.111, a work greatly admired by Chopin (amongst many others!) Its opening diminished seventh leaps sounded as if on loan from Chopin or Liszt (the B minor Sonata in particular), offering a fine sense of transition to Beethoven’s world: steeped here as much in the fantasias, especially that also in C minor, of Mozart as in the Romanticism of Beethoven’s own century (by now). Whatever the antecedents or successors, that fantasia-like quality and recognisably Beethovenian fury were strongly to the fore in the first movement. Phrases melted, to be sure, yet within that initially constructed frame. Flashes across the canvas—striking clarity of counterpoint in the development, extraordinary harmonic twists in the recapitulation—had me once more imagining I was hearing this music for the first time. The Arietta that opens the second and final movement sang with just the right sort of quiet dignity. Guy’s ear (and fingers) for telling detail ensured that, again, this corresponded only to a new vision, or so it seemed, beholden to no particular view from the past. The first variation continued and intensified; its successor worked magic that sounded, for all its familiarity, once more new, the third variation still more so. And so, the wondrous voyage continued, neither entirely familiar nor unfamiliar. Through a gossamer filigree extending already, so it seemed, beyond Mendelssohn, a snow-like brilliance on the white keys, a rapt sublimity that could never be mistaken for anyone else’s, and so much more, there was no doubt this was Beethoven—the cruel loss of whom in the pandemic year of 2020 some of us still feel and perhaps always will. Yet this was not pious or precious Beethoven; it lived and breathed in a way that rightly took nothing for granted.

Pollini: Chopin and Schumann, 1 March 2022

Royal Festival Hall

Schumann: Arabesque, op.18; Fantaisie in C major, op.17
Chopin: Sonata no.2 in B-flat minor, op.35; Berceuse in D-flat major, op.57; Polonaise in A-flat major, op.53

Maurizio Pollini (piano)

No one who heard this concert will forget it. Not because it was billed as Maurizio Pollini’s eightieth birthday concert (a stretch, given his birthday had fallen two months earlier), although the warmth of audience affection, give or take a telephone call or two, was palpable from the outset. It was, rather, on account of the Chopin Second Sonata. The advertised Mazurka, op.56 no.3, did not open the second half; the Sonata did. Its first movement was vehement, immediate, perhaps the result of greater physical effort than once would have been the case, yet if anything all the more moving for it. How it sang too, not so much tugging at the heartstrings as wrenching them. Sentiment, not sentimentality. The exposition’s struggle was greater the second time around. Already, we knew. A grimly inexorable scherzo gave way to relative relief in the trio, though we knew it would not last. While it did, though, we were bade to listen anew: something needed now more than ever. 

The Funeral March was, quite simply, overwhelming. Chopin and Pollini spoke as one, with outstanding clarity, directly to humanity. Sometimes there is a case for words; Pollini has been known to use them from the platform himself, less often than his well-nigh exact contemporary, Daniel Barenboim, yet with similar moral authority. Here, there was no such case. The voice of the human spirit in the central nocturne, a veritable epiphany, rose as if a single survivor from surrounding carnage. It was far from untroubled, and all the greater for it. Nor did time stand still; rather it held us in its sweet embrace, having us believe the moment were on the scale of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, or even that of Götterdämmerung, whose Siegfried had been buried only the night before at Madrid’s Teatro Real, draped in a Ukrainian flag. The ferocious, inhuman finale, quite without pity, terrified as the chill wind whose name and nature we dare not contemplate. In both movements, we knew. Applause was like none other I can recall in the middle of a recital. We knew.

The recital began with Schumann. His C major Arabeske had Bach as fons et origo, immanent, yet subtly inflected, aiding and propelling Schumann’s narrative. The dignity, moral and aesthetic, on which Pollini’s authority is founded was present from the outset. Again, sentiment, not sentimentality, the pathos of the minor-key episodes deeply moving. Half-lights of transition tended already towards Brahms. 

The Fantaisie opened, still more so, in the midst of things. If a whirlwind could be ardent and confessional, it would have been this. Again, emotional and intellectual integrity stood out. Starkness of opposition and alchemy of transition emerged not through sleight of hand, but through understanding that much lies between the notes. Formal challenges, especially yet not only in the first movement, were communicated and lived with relish, not smoothed over. This was a performance of possibilities, not of banal ‘solution’. Already, music spoke and sang as if it had words yet stood beyond them. There was an unmistakeably humanist, even heroic determination to the late Beethovenian line of a second movement that knew it could no longer be Beethoven. It was our lot as well as Schumann’s. It was, moreover, an almost Elgarian nobilmente we heard prior to temporary subsiding of the waves. If every single note were not there, so what? So much lies between and beyond them anyway. The third movement looked back at what had passed; this was the vindication of a seer (or better, a listener). Its emotional arc, founded on perfect harmonic understanding, offered a lesson in humanism as richly satisfying as those of Brahms or Schoenberg. 

An impossibly consoling Berceuse followed Chopin’s Sonata. Rock solid of rhythm, it was yet infinitely pliable. Through the truest of rubato, Chopin’s waters glistened, invited, even seduced. From an A-flat Polonaise of (fatally?) wounded swagger, there emerged a struggle worthy of Beethoven or Liszt, the foe mechanised and monstrous, heroism lying in further nocturnal depths. We knew, as we did in the cruelly if necessarily demanded encore: the G minor Ballade, its clarity of line equal to that of its moral purpose. Carrara marble of Pollini’s youth aurally gleamed once more, yet the depth of suffering was new, of our time alone. Strange realms were visited as if for the first time. In whispered confidence, in aching sorrow, in the proudest of defiance, we knew.

Hewitt - Mozart, Messiaen, and Chopin, 23 November 2021

Wigmore Hall

Mozart: Piano Sonata in C major, KV 309/284b
Messiaen: Préludes: ‘La colombe’, ‘Le nombre léger’, ‘Instants défunts’, ‘Les sons impalpables du rêve’, ‘Plainte calme’, ‘Un reflet dans le vent’
Mozart: Piano Sonata in B-flat major, KV 281/189f
Chopin: Nocturne in F minor, op.55 no.1; Nocturne in E-flat major, op.55 no.2; Scherzo in E major, op.54

Angela Hewitt (piano)

A slightly strange programme, this, albeit with much to enjoy. Neither of the Mozart piano sonatas is generally considered popular or even immediately ingratiating; that made it all the more interesting to hear what Angela Hewitt would do with them. Leopold Mozart found the C major Piano Sonata, KV 309/284d ‘strange’, having something in it ‘of the rather artificial Mannheim style’, though he modified that judgement by saying that the Mannheim contingent was ultimately so small that his son’s good style was not spoiled. In the first movement exposition, Hewitt nonetheless seemed to take Leopold at his word, giving an unyielding, unsmiling account, seemingly etched in chrome: clearly a performance decision, since she did not continue like that, either in this or other works. The development’s plunge into the minor was powerfully dramatic, speaking of the opera house both in initial gesture and melting, vocal response. If only there had been greater sense of harmonic direction and indeed of how various figures, finely articulated in themselves, might cohere to form a greater whole. Although neither of the remaining two movements smiled or relaxed quite as they might, they had more of that at least, emerging much the stronger for it. Hewitt’s deadpan sign-off in the finale’s coda was almost worth the price of admission alone. 

Hearing six of Messiaen’s eight piano Préludes was a little strange too, though there was plenty of variety to those that reached the stage. In this, the composer’s first published work—Le banquet céleste, written earlier, was published later—we naturally hear considerable influence from Debussy, for which Hewitt’s ability to play ‘without hammers’ proved duly illuminating. There were other ghosts at the feast too: Dukas, Franck, perhaps Ravel, and of course Liszt. It was as fascinating to chart their interaction as to bask in premonitions of Messiaen’s mature musical language and method. Many of the building blocks were there, not least modes of limited transposition, but the sensibility was somewhat different. Sometimes, that is; for in the closing ‘Un reflet dans le vent’, everything—in a wonderfully synthetic vision—came together, both in text and performance. Hewitt seemed to pick up contrapuntal tendencies from Mozart amidst the polymodal chromaticism of ‘Les sons impalpable du rêve’, though Bach was the likelier progenitor. At any rate, there was something feverish enough to suggest a dream world, without loss of clarity or direction. I very much liked the song-like quality imparted to ‘Plainte calme’: a deceptive simplicity, perhaps, in its mysticism. Much the same might be said of the opening prelude, ‘La colombe’, whose constructivism seemed both to the fore and magnificently beside the point. 

Hewitt seemed to view—certainly to interpret—Mozart’s B-flat major Sonata, KV 281/189f, more warmly than its predecessor. Here there was just as much variety of articulation as in the C major Sonata, but its first movement seemed to sing more freely. Less Mannheim, perhaps, and more aspiration to Vienna—or even to London, for the spirit of Bach (this time, Johann Christian) is surely more in evidence here. A crisp, unfussy opening Allegro gave way to an Andante amoroso suggestive of opera rather than born of it; this is instrumental music after all. Hewitt’s phrasing and voicing made a fine case for music all too readily underestimated. The closing ‘Rondeau’ delighted, its darker, chromatic turns voiced without over-emphasis, always attentive to a need for light and shade. That is not to suggest an old-fashioned Meissen china sensibility, but rather an ultimately sunny disposition that may not be mine yet has its own rewards. There are, I think, darker currents, sharper dramatic twists here, even in such early Mozart; others are free to think—and play—differently. 

Hewitt’s final set turned to Chopin. After a somewhat plain—deliberately so, I am sure—opening to the F minor Nocturne, op.55 no.1, her performance developed into something quite compelling, a strong sense of narrative drive allied to harmonic and motivic development. Likewise for its companion piece in E-flat major, op.55 no.2, which sang as it developed. The E major Scherzo seemed to offer an entire world: not unlike a sonata or symphony, save for the fact that it is entirely unlike a sonata or symphony. Here, rather more so than in Mozart (certainly the C major Sonata), different, contrasting material sounded—and felt—more clearly, dramatically integrated. We hear overt Romantic virtuosity less often than we might from Hewitt, but certainly did at the close: thrillingly. So too did we in a big-hearted, big-boned encore account of Liszt’s transcription of Schumann’s Widmung. I should be fascinated to hear Hewitt play more Liszt.

‘Let music not be forgotten in the meantime’: Sonatas, Fantasies, and Fragments by Schumann and Chopin

 

In Beethoven’s wake, composers, especially in the Austro-German tradition, asked themselves what should become of forms and genres he had seemingly taken to their ultimate, foremost among them the sonata and symphony. Allied to increasing interest, born of literary Romanticism, in the idea of the ‘fragment’ – for Friedrich Schlegel, ‘a small work of art, complete in itself and separated from its surrounding world, like a hedgehog’ – such pressure led in several directions: rejuvenation and rejection of old forms only two possible polarities. We shall hear in this programme Schumann wrestle with such questions; Chopin take, to Schumann’s bemusement, a very different sonata path; and much territory both between and beyond.

‘For ladies’

Writing in 1843, Schumann argued that ‘difficulties in form and content’ had prevented much of his music from gaining greater public esteem. The C major Arabeske, composed over his Vienna winter of 1838–9, had represented an attempt to offer something less elusive, less enigmatic, or, as Schumann put it, ‘for ladies’. In Classical terms, we may consider it a rondo: ABACA plus coda. Schumann’s literary alter egos, Florestan and Eusebius, appear respectively in passionately extrovert, minor-key episodes and wistful, introspective postlude. Strong interrelationships between first section and episodes, whether in thematic derivation or transitional return, suggest a fluid conception of developmental variation somewhere between Beethoven and Brahms.

A Lone First Movement

Schumann’s love of dotted quaver-semiquaver figures – the first note may be a quaver, followed by a semiquaver rest – as heard in the Arabeske also informs the Allegro in B minor op. 8. Conceived as the first movement to a piano sonata, completed or nearly so, yet otherwise destroyed, it occupies an interesting place in Schumann’s development. The pianist-composer integrates aspects of virtuoso display into a respectable, even venerable, musical form. We might suspect the opening cadenza to announce an improvisatory fantasia; it turns out instead to be a sonata-form movement’s first thematic group. The stark motto enunciated at its heart—B–C sharp–F sharp—proves to have multiple thematic consequences, serving, John Daverio observed, ‘as bass line for the elaboration of the first group, melodic backbone for the opening of the lyric second theme, head motif for the development, underpinning for the sequentially conceived retransition, and herald of the coda’. We might not be surprised to discern in those letters an extra-musical cipher, though that seems not to be the case. For Romanticism, incompletion does not itself signify a fragment; a fragment must in some sense be complete. However, like a ruin of yore, incompletion, however construed, forms a good basis on which to construct a fragment.

Sonata or Fantasy?

The Fantasie op. 17 is a very different kettle of fish: in Charles Rosen’s words, ‘the monument that commemorates the death of the Classical style’. The idea is especially apt given Schumann’s intention at one point during its complicated genesis to offer proceeds as his contribution to a Beethoven monument in Bonn (its committee chaired by the other Schlegel brother, August Wilhelm). Schumann expanded a single movement of 1836, a ‘fantasy’ called Ruinen – ‘a deep lament for you’, he told Clara during their enforced separation – into a three-movement ‘sonata’ entitled Ruinen, Trophaen, Palmen, tension between ancient and modern, introspection and the monumental integral to its design. Many continue to view the Fantasie in relation to sonata genre and forms, yet Schumann seems to have become convinced during, perhaps by virtue of, its composition that they had ‘run their course’, at least as comprehensible to his Classical forebears. ‘We should not repeat the same thing century after century’, he wrote in 1839; by all means write ‘sonatas, or fantasies (what’s in a name!), but let music not be forgotten in the meantime’.

Form, then, must not become formula; it is experienced as interplay between sonata and fantasy and other opposing yet related forces. Outer movements begin in medias res, with something to them of the old improvisatory fantasia. On the first’s stage appear Florestan and Eusebius as equals. The third hymns the latter, seemingly have cast off the last vestiges of Florestan’s sonata-like material. They frame and are framed by Florestan’s grand second-movement march. Mediating these oppositions, there appear (at least) two ghosts from Romanticism’s past and one from its present. First is Beethoven: in musical inheritance, but also in the first movement coda’s allusion to the closing song of Beethoven’s song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte, where the protagonist bids his ‘beloved’ during their separation to accept the songs he had once sung. Second is Schlegel, in musico-literary method and, explicitly, in Schumann’s inscription from his Die Gebüsche (once set by Schubert):

Durch alle Töne tönet
Im bunten Erdentraume,
Ein leiser Ton gezogen,
Für den, der heimlich lauschet.
(Through all the sounds
in the earth’s many-coloured dream,
one faint sound echoes
for him who secretly listens.)

Third and most important is Clara. ‘Are you not’, Schumann wrote to her, ‘the tone in the inscription?’. Is she (or Robert)? Who, then, is the secret listener? It need not be either/or.

The array of reference is dizzying: internal, external, and in a strange liminal zone of the literary-musical. Tonal and thematic relationships, as ambiguous as they are complex and thoroughgoing, fuse with questions of genre. The distinction Schumann drew between ‘higher’ or ‘noble’ forms, such as sonata, symphony or ‘fantasy’, and smaller, ‘characteristic’, simpler pieces, pertains within as well as between works. ‘Im Legendenton’, a Eusebian Lieder ohne Wortre of paradoxically timeless archaism – a musical ruin – that blossoms with typical Romantic passion, is flanked by Florestan’s sonata tendencies. For Daverio, it offers an instance of Schlegel’s conception of the Arabeske: ‘humorous, witty, or sentimental digressions that intentionally disturb the chronological flow of a narrative’, yet, ‘as a total form, […] tempers a seemingly chaotic diversity through a deliberately concealed logical process’. For Nicholas Marston, it is from here that Florestan’s flanking music is derived, if only in retrospect, by way of parallel to Schlegel’s fragmentary novel La Lucinde. The idea of a single reading misses the point. A multiplicity of readings, of (potential) performances, both fragments and unifies. Such, then, are those ‘difficulties in form and content’ to which Schumann would later refer, and which seem to have discouraged even Liszt, the dedicatee of the Fantasie, from frequent performance: ‘too difficult’, he wrote to Schumann, ‘for the public to digest’.

‘Unruly children’

We turn to Chopin for the single work named a ‘Piano Sonata’: his Second, in B flat minor op. 35. Schumann commented, sceptically, that Chopin having ‘called it a “sonata” suggests a joke, if not sheer bravado. He seems to have taken four of his most unruly children and put them together, possibly thinking to smuggle them, as a sonata, into company where they might not be considered individually presentable.’ There is no evidence to back up that observation, which says more about Schumann in 1841 than Chopin in 1839, when he wrote three of the four movements. Less weighed down by Beethoven’s example, Chopin had greater liberty to strike out on his own. He used the sonata genre, to quote Jim Samson, as ‘a framework within which the achievements of his earlier music – the figurative patterns of the Études and Preludes, the cantilenas of the Nocturnes, and even the periodicity of the dance pieces –might be drawn together in a kind of synthesis’.

More readily than the first movement of Schumann’s Fantasie, we may hear Chopin’s opening movement in terms of (modified) sonata form, especially in its exposition: a brief, powerful ‘Grave’ introduction followed by a headlong first subject and songful successor. ‘There is beautiful song in this first movement, too’, Schumann wrote, adding that the younger Chopin’s Polish qualities were vanishing, ‘via Germany, towards Italy’. We may beg to differ; Schumann did himself, continuing: ‘As soon as the song is sung, the Pole flashes forth again in all his bold originality. Certainly, Bellini never would nor could have dared the interwoven chords encountered after the close of the first episode of the second part.’ Indeed, though to be fair to Bellini, he had no more wish to do so than Chopin had to follow the hallowed (German) tonal pattern of the ‘double reprise’. The question is not ‘why did he not?’ but ‘why might you think he would have done?’. In place of the archetypal tonal drama of the Beethoven sonata, Chopin reveals his nocturne-like second subject as both heart and destination.

Typically for a Chopin scherzo, the second movement is quite without humour, even of Beethoven’s gruff variety. In dark E flat minor, its central ‘Più lento’ section shifts for the Trio to G flat major, more song – echoing the first movement’s second subject – than dance. Inner part voicing delineates Chopin’s delicate balance, born more of Bach and Mozart than Beethoven, between melody, harmony and counterpoint. Written two years earlier, the celebrated Marche funèbre offers similar contrast, this time between memorial and nocturne.

The moto perpetuo Finale represented, for Schumann, ‘more mockery than music. And yet one must confess that from this songless and cheerless movement there breathes a special and dreadful spirit, suppressing with resolute fist every inclination to resist.’ The music has certainly proved an enigma to many: Chopin at his most modernistic, even athematic? Perhaps. Again, however, is that the point? There is irony, bitter or otherwise, in this display, both in character and brevity, following the funeral march. Arthur Rubinstein described ‘night winds sweeping over churchyard graves’. The music needs neither poetic nor formal naming. Like a Prelude or Étude, it sweeps across the keys with diabolical magic entirely the piano’s own.

Singing on Its Own Terms

The Berceuse op. 57 bears affinities with the central section of the Sonata’s Scherzo. Like the Sonata itself, though, it speaks, or rather sings, on its own terms. Whatever its starting point – allegedly a lullaby for singer Pauline Viardot’s baby daughter – the music’s glittering ornamentation beguiles us into believing it, not the ostinato bass, to be the form-creating substance of 15 variations. Sometimes our ears know better than our eyes or biographies. Samson observes the patterns of Chopin’s ornamentation gain ‘new meaning precisely because of their divorce from harmonic progression, dynamic curve and even melody’. They become objects of contemplation, heard, like the Sonata’s Finale, simply as themselves. Liszt, Debussy, Ravel and other composers to this day have savoured and furthered this Romantic legacy. 

Swagger and Suggestion

The A flat major Polonaise op. 53 was Chopin’s last (bar, aptly enough, a Polonaise-Fantasy, op. 61). It strides majestically across the keyboard with fierce confidence and purpose that render its genre a starting point rather than a destination. It is clearly not intended straightforwardly to ‘be’ a dance. The composer bears witness, as if prefiguring a Liszt tone poem, to both particular and universal in wounded ‘national’ pride and heroism. Chopin’s late preoccupation with ostinato refreshes the central section, once more rejecting any notion of form as formula. Orchestral suggestiveness is no mere imitation. A piano can suggest an orchestra, but an orchestra cannot suggest itself – at least not prior, say, to Helmut Lachenmann. In sonority as in form, music is certainly not, as Schumann had it, ‘forgotten in the meantime’.

 (This essay was first published in a 2021 Salzburg Festival programme to accompany a recital by Maurizio Pollini.)