NYO/Adès - Liszt, Adès, and Berlioz, 8 August 2026

Royal Albert Hall

Liszt: Mephisto Waltz no.1, S.110/2
Adès: Dante: Part 2, ‘Purgatorio’
Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique, op.14

National Youth Orchestra

Thomas Adès (conductor)

Images:  BBC / Chris Christodoulou

To hear the National Youth Orchestra is always a treat. The enthusiasm of young musicians, not a cynical bone in their bodies, can hardly be gainsaid; but enthusiasm will only get one so far. These musicians have technical and musical capabilities beyond their years; many will have professional careers ahead of them. Just look at the NYO’s alumni. They will have many more rehearsals than a professional orchestra could every hope for. (Eat your heart out, Celibidache!) There is also the sheer joy of hearing an orchestra of this size too, again unaffordable on the professional scene for almost anything but Gurrelieder—and often not even then. Berlioz knew a true orchestral pianissimo required a far greater body of musicians than one was ever likely to hear, rendering his works either utopian or unperformable or, on some measure, inadequately performed in reality. What we hear today from ‘period’ and ‘modern’ orchestras alike, whatever the ideological claims of the latter, will almost always fall short of what he required. Such is life, at least under capitalism. We stretch our resources to breaking-point and beyond, and ultimately make do with less than perfection; otherwise, we should hear nothing at all. It was nonetheless a treat to hear the Symphonie fantastique played with musicians within the range of his expectation, if still towards the lower end (albeit with more powerful, modern instruments). 

Before that, the first half of this concert conducted by Thomas Adès offered music by Liszt and Adès himself. The greatest musical avant-gardist of the nineteenth century, Liszt was stranger neither to ideas nor to practice in the realm of musical ‘progress’: neither on the piano nor the orchestra, inventing for the latter the new genre of the symphonic poem. So important were they to Wagner that he actually played down some of his own prior innovation, here strictly preceding that of Liszt, so as to incorporate Liszt’s poems into his musico-historical schema. The first Mephisto Waltz has a not dissimilar conception, reminding us that there were orchestral works before Liszt, as there have been many after, that may not strictly be classified in that way, but which at least come close. (Ask Berlioz, for one.) No one writes – plays, listens – in a vacuum. Coming to this music for the first time or the hundredth – the latter unlikely, for we hear it far less often than we might – no one would have failed to register the NYO’s musical, indeed human energy from the conductor’s first downbeat, indeed before that too. Unanimity of sound, but also of purpose, reached through collaboration rather than dictatorship, was apparent here and throughout the entire concert, whether in the opening phrase or the whirlwind that ensued, string crescendi a remarkable case in point (more difficult than they might sound). It was quite a ride for all of us. Handling the sudden change of tempo for the love music is a difficult task: how to ensure necessary contrast but also ‘symphonic’ continuity. If Adès proved stronger in the former than the latter, there was nonetheless much to admire and be thrilled by—especially in the return to full throttle. Moreover, all orchestral solos were taken exquisitely (again, very much the case throughout the concert). 

Adès’s ballet Dante was written for the Royal Opera House and Opéra de Paris for the septcentenary of Dante’s birth. Here we heard the second of its three parts, ‘Purgatorio’. Its performance seemed once again to be outstanding, NYO musicians clearly relishing the opportunity to work with a composer on his music, in a performance it is difficult to imagine being surpassed. I felt decidedly ambivalent to it as music, though, a promising opening leading to outright bathos. The first six of its seven sections contains recorded material: baqashot chants, as revealed in Edward Venn’s useful note, connecting both with the composer’s family history and themes in Dante. They were fascinating to hear, as was, at the music’s best, their incitement to and/or emergence from orchestral material, be it for solo instruments, groups, or something approaching a full ensemble. I am not sure the writing always escapes orientalism, arguably all the more pronounced in frequent combination – almost as if we had not progressed from Saint-Saëns – of tonality and ‘fantastic’, ‘Oriental’ colouring. The microtones of the ‘real thing’ had considerably more intrinsic character. Despite the tendency towards film music, one could imagine it danced—and that was of course part of the point. 

There were certainly thrills to be heard when we reached the final ‘Ascent’ in ten horns or five trombones standing together to play. When joined by bells, though, the score ended up sounding uncomfortably close to a television ‘Christmas special’. It made a noise, as did the orchestra, but beyond that? Wagner advised Liszt not to write a ‘Paradiso’ movement for his Dante Symphony, declaring depiction of paradise beyond the powers of music: advice Liszt wisely heeded, substituting a ‘Magnificat’. Given the nature of this musical approach, I think I shall similarly refrain as listener. Whatever my misgivings, a poorly-behaved audience – slurping ice cream, dropping things on the floor, taking phone calls, air conducting, and more – loved it. 

And so, to Berlioz, gifts of conductor and orchestra united in a performance that threatened to raise the roof even of the Albert Hall, yet lacked nothing in subtle detail. The first movement received as fine a performance as I can recall for a long time, its introduction barely registering as such, but rather as one stage, full of potential yet equally absorbing on its own terms, in an ever-developing, shortish symphonic poem of its own. NYO energy could be experienced as coming direct not only from the players but their instruments: testimony to Adès’s wise stewardship in pursuit of Berlioz’s goals. I was especially intrigued by the darker corners, timbre, harmony, tempo, and more united in production of colour and motion. All manner of shades between them and the composer’s signature manic Romanticism made for another captivating journey, as did a graceful, yet at-times-menacing second-movement ball, here given with cornet solo. (Truth be told, I prefer it without, but in this context, it would have been idiocy not to give the soloist his moment to shine, as he certainly did.) 

Once the ballroom had been brought to eyes and ears, the ‘Scène aux champs’ unfolded with every bit as keen a sense of musical narration. Excellent use was made of the Albert Hall; in veritable coups de théâtre, both oboe echo of cor anglais solo (excellent in both cases) and thunder-drums above in stereo with their siblings below made fine use of the gallery. Berlioz would have loved the spatial drama, as, I am sure, he would the Beethoven rarely more than a little below the surface, underpinning the movement’s structure. The darker timbres of the ‘March to the Scaffold’ echoed and extended the aforementioned corners in the first movement, lugubrious and extravert twin sides to the same fateful coin. If ever you had wanted to experience the sound of eight bassoons standing from within an orchestra, here was your opportunity. That was not in itself the point, but rather what was done with them—which proved to be of equal excellence.

A duly rollicking finale combined narrative and musical coherence to the extent that it would have been inconceivable to divide them. As black sabbath bells pealed from the gallery, witches and skeletons came to life and partied below. Coordination was no mean task in itself; bar one slightly precarious moment, quickly salvaged, there was no problem at all. The chase to the close, full of incident, imparted a properly Gothic thrill in this monstrous hall. If it were no surprise to be treated to an encore, the choice of music perhaps was: a darkly sensual John Barry ‘Space March’ from the score to You Only Live Twice. Now that is how you do film music.

Stefanovich - ‘Labyrinth’: Bach, Kurtág, Debussy, and Liszt, 19 February 2026

 

Milton Court

Bach: Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother, BWV 992
Kurtág: Eight Piano Pieces, op.3; Játékok: ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin – enragée’
Debussy: ‘La fille aux cheveux de lin’
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Birthday Elegy for Judit – for the second finger of her left hand’. ‘Apple Blossom’
Liszt: Nuages gris, S 199; Unstern! S 208
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Adoration, Adoration, Accursed Desolation’, ‘Dolna’
Debussy: ‘Des pas sur la neige’, Études: ‘pour les huit doigts’, ‘pour les arpèges composés’
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Objet trouvé’, Twelve microludes, ‘Antiphony in F-sharp’, ‘Les adieux (in Janáčeks Manier)’
Bach: The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080: Contrapunctus I
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Ligatura y’
Bach: The Art of Fugue: Contrapunctus XIV
Kurtág: Játékok: ‘Pantomime’

Tamara Stefanovich (piano)  

Images: Ed Maitland Smith

György Kurtág is the last man standing of the 'postwar avant garde': not merely standing, but writing too. Elliott Carter’s late period was unprecedented, a regular source of wonder, but even he did not write two operas in his nineties, the second, Die Stechardin, to be premiered in Budapest on the first full day of his second century. For the centenary itself, cities across the world offered thanks and celebration. London’s response was offered in typically imaginative form by Tamara Stefanovich. 

Bach’s music has proved a lodestar for Kurtág’s creative life, whether in his piano transcriptions or deeper intellectual and emotional influence upon his own ‘original’ compositions. It was fitting, therefore, that he should feature so prominently in this finely constructed programme. The first piece, the early Capriccio on the departure of a beloved brother, might have seemed a strange choice, but its uncharacteristic aspects reminded us quite how adventurous, even avant-gardist Bach was, how broad his terms of reference were, and how he could confound as much as any other composer. Stefanovich played up its character, especially at the outset, not least in the instrumental – in more than one sense – role of ornaments. It might almost have been a work by a French. Navigating a fine line between harpsichord terraced dynamics and piano shading, she showed not only how one need not choose, but how the interaction both on a local and a more sectional level could contribute to form and, in this unusual case, programmatic narrative. As it progressed, its chromaticism truly told: melting yet directed, in almost Mozartian fashion. Bachian joy in extravert, major mode was just as apparent and felt. Bells pealed, horns called, the labyrinth that gave its name to the recital as a whole deepened: here was a mini-recital in itself as well as a curtain-raiser of blazing originality. 

Taken attacca, Kurtág’s bagatelle-like Eight Piano Pieces, op.3, now sixty years old, emerged in similarly declamatory, expressive, and original fashion. They formed a coherent whole, whilst exuding individual character of their own, contrast, complement, and dialectical mediation between what had passed before a guiding thread through this section of the labyrinth. Given the authority of the piano playing, one could readily take its virtuosity for granted, but of course one should not; not only was it laudable in itself, it is a key aspect to Kurtág’s exploration of his instrument, just as would be the case in Bach, Debussy or Liszt. Though Kurtág could not have known them at this time, Boulez’s Notations sounded as if a reference point, albeit distilled into still more starkly concentrated form. Webern was doubtless a crucial mediator here. 

Pairing of Debussy and Kurtág’s ‘Fille aux cheveux de lin’ pieces likewise ensued with the inevitability – and initial serendipity – of a fine pairing of food and wine. A barrage of coughing from all quarters was unfortunate, to put it mildly, but the emergence of Debussy’s understated radicalism, through Stefanovich’s endlessly variegated piano line, from within the world of Kurtág suggested a performance very much for this programme; had the programming been otherwise so would the programming, which is just as it should be. Kurtág in turn seemed to prepare the way in musical transformation for the more overtly world of late Liszt. The Venetian haze of Nuages gris was now tinged with further shadows cast and faintly dappled light shed by Kurtág and Debussy. So much twentieth- and even twentieth-first-century music is rooted in this strange, twilit world, yet that should not lead us to overlook its more formal, generative legacy. There was little chance of doing so here, no more than in a post-Mephistophelian performance of Unstern! Collective rhetoric harnessed to musical ends, the notes seemed to extend in all directions, Liszt the seer momentarily elevated. 

Returning to the world of Játékok, or perhaps better that world renewed, Kurtág very much created his own world in a few notes from those ashes, Webern again the principal, though far from the only, ghost at the feast. The combination of insistence and fantasy in, say, ‘Dolna’ suggesting distillation of Bach’s Capriccio into a fleeting yet unmistakeably tangible essence. Falling back into Debussy in an archlike form reminiscent of Kurtág’s beloved Bartók, the recital brought us steps in the snow without hammers followed by a pair of Études to remind us that ‘technique’, both as composition and performance, can and should be just as ‘poetic’ and thrilling as anything else. A succession of further Kurtág miniatures seemed, like the music of his forebears, to extend the piano keyboard and its capabilities before our eyes and ears. Every twist of the kaleidoscope brought a statement both consequent and new, the spectre of Ligeti listening, nodding, and, I think, smiling. 

Then to Bach’s Art of Fugue, perhaps as far removed in character as well as chronology from the opening Capriccio. The relationship between freedom and organisation is always complex, whether in Bach, Kurtág, Debussy, Liszt, or others—or indeed in performance. Yet the absolute ‘rightness’ of what we heard here, even if it could readily be heard otherwise, seemed perfectly suited to Bach’s testament, its first Contrapunctus both prepared by all that had preceded it and a cleansing, nourishing sorbet. Dignified and directed, its harmony and counterpoint were in excellent balance. Kurtág’s ‘Ligatura y’ seemed in its way to mirror Bach by way of Webern and Messiaen, in turn preparing the way for the crowning glory of the unfinished Contrapunctus XIV, symmetry and development indivisible—until the labyrinthine thread broke off: silence! Kurtág’s ‘Pantomime’ proved the perfect, Beckettian response in near-silence of its own. As Simon Rattle remarked of the composer’s Stele, it is ‘a gravestone on which the entire history of European music is written’. Yet Kurtág, this recital reminded us, is alive—and writing.

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.

 

Piemontesi, Schubert and Liszt, 9 May 2025

Wigmore Hall

Schubert: Fantasy in C major, D 605a, ‘Graz’
Schubert: Four Impromptus, D 935
Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor, S 178

Francesco Piemontesi (piano)

  

Francesco Piemontesi offered a series of surprises, none unwelcome, in this fine Wigmore Hall recital of music by Schubert and Liszt. No piece was taken for granted, though by the same token, none was remoulded for the sake of remoulding. An array of possibilities was brought to life through exquisite command of touch and formidable foundation of intellect. 

The so-called ‘Graz’ Fantasy, D 605a, made for an excellent, even spellbinding opening. I was immediately put in mind of an observation by Donald Tovey on the piano music of Liszt, that it showed – irrespective of its musical quality – he was incapable of making an ugly sound on the keyboard.  Simple C major arpeggios sounded as if they were the rarest things in the world, the fifth bar’s flattened submediant piercing as perhaps only Schubert can. The first section as a whole emerged as something akin to a threshold for pianistic Romanticism, its fantasia quality, harking back to Mozart and beyond, in gradual self-revelation. The alla polacca music, in a typically distant – as distant as one can be – F-sharp major was delightfully quirky, dancing as if it were early Chopin. As the music became more involved, Piemontesi’s performance was never cluttered; here, as elsewhere, there was always space, irrespective of tempo, whose fundamental qualities always endured. The serenity with which opening material returned was deeply touching. 

The advent of the first of four impromptus, that in F minor, felt like the opening of a new chapter: not exactly presaged by the Fantasy, yet foretold. This was, of course, a different Schubert, from the close of his all-too-brief compositional life; and yet, without contrivance, it was also the same Schubert, similarly spun from the finest of Egyptian cotton, if that is not to undersell. There was something dream-like, though not too dream-like, to the piece’s progression, to the emergence of music that had somehow always been there, waiting simply to be voiced as a song without words. Its ambivalence and the pain of return to the tonic could hardly have been more movingly conveyed. Perhaps the second impromptu, the A-flat Allegretto, was a little understated, a little too innig; or perhaps that was simply a matter of taste. There was no doubting its lyricism, nor that of the B-flat theme and variations, Piemontesi’s disinclination to make a meal of it welcome. Subtlety of melodic line, the telling quality of lilt and breath, and the ‘natural’ quality to this music-making, not least in the unexaggerated pathos of the fourth variation, all proved telling. One can overdo the ‘sonata’ designation to these pieces; if Schubert had intended them as such, he would doubtless have said so. Nonetheless, the fourth, returning to F minor, felt very much like a finale: one that foretold Brahms still more than Liszt, taking its leave nonetheless from the world of the Moments musicaux. 

In the introduction to Liszt’s B minor Sonata, Piemontesi seemed determined to show – more to the point, he did – that preconceived oppositions are worth no more than the ether into which they are typed. This music can be taut and rhetorical, if one so chooses, and will most probably benefit from such integrative performance. At any rate, it provided quite the launch pad for the exposition proper, whose initial combination of fury and rhythmic insistence sounded new, not to be compared to previous ‘schools’ of performance. Throughout, decisions that initially had me wonder provided their own confirmation, for instance the continued insistent quality for the coming of the second group. Though on a considerably grander scale, the work in context nonetheless emerged as a mercurial, sulphurous successor to the Schubert Fantasy—not that Liszt could have known it, undiscovered until 1962. Yet its concision truly told too, Liszt’s Beethovenian side inevitably revealing itself amidst, indeed through, the grandiloquence. Again, there was no sense of being rushed; time seemed almost to stand still prior to the fugato, which verily bolted, preparing the way inevitably for return. The (certain) uncertainty in aftershock was not the least surprise in what felt like a symphonic poem for, certainly not reduced to, piano. 

Two encores, both again welcome surprises, were a lively account Wilhelm Kempff’s transcription of Bach’s Chorale Prelude, ‘Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme,‘ BWV 645, which built magnificently, and a delectable response in ‘Au lac de Wallenstadt’ from Liszt’s first (Swiss) book of Années de pèlerinage.

Crowe/Sulayman/Drake - Mendelssohn and Liszt, 14 January 2025

Wigmore Hall

Mendelssohn: Abendlied, op.8 no.9; Erntelied, op.8 no.4; Keine von der Erde Schönen, WoO 4 no.1; Schafloser Augen Leuchte, WoO 4 no.2; Pilgerspruch, op.8 no.5; Frühlingslied, op.8 no.6; Das Waldschloss, WoO 17 no.1; Pagenlied, WoO 17 no.1; Romanze, op.8 no.10; Hexenlied, op.8 no.8; Todeslied der Bojaren, WoO 18 no.2; Ich hör ein Vöglein, WoO 18 no.1
Liszt: Tre sonetti de Petrarca, S 270/2
Liszt: Freudvoll und Leidvoll, S 280/2; Wieder möcht ich dir begegnen, S 322; Lasst mich ruhen, S 317; Ihr Glocken von Marling, S 328; Verlassen, S 336; Blume und Duft, S 324; Freudvoll und Leidvoll II, S 280b; Angiolin dal biondo crin, S 269/2; Go not, happy day, S 335
Mendelssohn: Volkslied, op.63 no.5; Maiglöckchen und die Blümelein, op.63 no.6

Lucy Crowe (soprano)

Karim Sulayman (tenor)

Julius Drake (piano)

 

An interesting recital of songs by Mendelssohn and Liszt raised questions concerning what we expect of and in a Liederabend. Contrasts are in general a good thing, yet might they impede the development of a guiding thread making the evening more than the sum of its parts? Can the contrary case also prove a problem? How do ideas transfer from paper to performance? Though we applaud versatility and adventure, complaining when performers and venues give us the same old repertoire over and over again, how much should a programme be constructed around performers’ acknowledged strengths? 

Often underestimated on account of his ‘Victorian’ reputation, Mendelssohn seems perpetually in need of reassessment. An assortment of songs, given in pairs by Lucy Crowe and Karim Sulayman, accompanied by Julius Drake, might have been just the thing, yet was the selection, ranging far from the beaten track, at least in some ways more interesting than satisfying? Crowe at any rate offered a nicely contrasted opening pair, though Drake’s piano parts at times sounded a little stiff. Although that in part have reflected the writing and there was benefit in laying bare the counterpoint ‘as written’, not least in voice leading, more overt advocacy might also have helped. Sulayman’s first pair, Byron settings (in translation), proved more ardent and imploring, revealing a beautiful lyric tenor, Crowe responding in Pilgerspruch with a well-placed ‘early Romantic’ approach emerging from earlier Classicism, yet in colouring extending beyond it. In general, where Mendelssohn become more ‘Romantic’, distancing himself from models that were perhaps more operatic, their fruits tending to sound a little fussy in the concert hall, the stronger the impression became. Narratives such as Das Waldschloss (Sulayman) and Hexenlied (Crowe) were cases in point. The highly unusual Todeslied der Bojaren also grabbed the attention, its dramatic starkness arresting and surprising, Sulayman imparting an almost visionary quality to it. In a charming Ich hör ein Vöglein, he hinted at waters running deeper, without trying to turn the song into something it is not. And the strangeness of the late Tennyson setting, Go not, happy day, was relished. 

In Liszt, the record was also mixed, perhaps more so. Crowe’s Sonetti de Petrarca, before the interval, received committed performances from her, although Drake might have offered a little more in the way of Romantic abandon. Whether they were quite her thing, though, lingered as a question. Whilst some way from strained, there were passages in which the longer, cantabile line proved elusive. There was a proper sense of a new world, new aesthetics, and so on, yet it was only in the third of the set, ‘I’ vidi in terra angelici costumi’, taken at a helpfully swift tempo, that the longer line truly emerged. Her second-half Angiolin dal biondo crin also benefited from being heard as if in a single breath, revealing perhaps unsuspected riches in a Liszt rarity (his first song, albeit in its 1850s revision). 

Liszt’s songs are not for everyone. Fischer-Dieskau, game to take them on, lacked some of the requisite Italianate quality (not the only one, but a sine qua non) for the Petrarch sonnets. Sulayman’s Liszt performances, bookended by two of his settings of Freudvoll und Leidvoll, tended mostly towards a world of reverie, the final of those Goethe settings offering welcome contrast in its tumult. If I did not especially mind, I wondered whether a little more contrast might have helped: a sequence of several slow songs, tending, as it were, toward the listless, lacked variety. That said, the desolation of Verlassen, the quiet ecstasy, piano bells and all, of Ihr Glocken von Marling, and the fragrance and flowers of Blume und Duft were all in themselves highly welcome. 

Perhaps anticipating potential criticisms, Drake announced that now, at last, we should hear the two singers together. In conclusion, Crowe, Sulayman, and Drake gave two vocal duets by Mendelssohn. Sensitively done and, especially in the case of the second, Maiglöckchen und die Blümelein, op.63 no.6, winningly animated, they arguably imparted a sense of what might have been, yet were nonetheless a delight. As an encore, we heard the unusual, intriguing Suleike und Hatem, a Goethe setting by Fanny Hensel. It had much in common with her brother’s songs: finely crafted, clearly in a Classical line, though perhaps not quite fully inside the Lied tradition. Whether that suggests we might revise our conceptions of the latter, founded (too strongly?) on Schubert, Schumann, et al., is a question worth asking from time to time.  

Levit - Bach, Brahms, and Beethoven, 27 September 2024

Royal Festival Hall

Bach: Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, BWV 903
Brahms: Four Ballades, op.10
Beethoven-Liszt: Symphony no.7 in A major, op.92, S 464/7

Igor Levit (piano)

The Royal Festival Hall can seem too large for a solo piano recital. It needs a pianist to fill it, which, as anyone acquainted with the monstrous Royal Albert Hall will testify, is more a matter of drawing one in to listen than of external projection. Fortunately, Igor Levit showed himself fully able to do so, in a fascinating programme, given without an interval, of Bach, Brahms and Beethoven, the latter arranged by Liszt. 

A highly declamatory opening to Bach’s Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue presented it unabashedly as ‘Steinway music’. Equally noteworthy, though, was the sense of its chromaticism, of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale coming into play. Not for nothing did Schoenberg call Bach the first twelve-note composer. This was not simply a matter of Bach, but of Levit too, inviting us to immerse ourselves in melodies, harmonies, in the workings of Bach’s modulatory tonal plan, both in a properly improvisatory fantasia and in a fugue whose subject emerged tenderly, wandering, to build and ultimately find resolution. Featherlight, almost Mendelssohnian playing combined with grander rhetorical delivery, as composer and pianist patiently and capriciously combined the learned and the mercurial. 

Twilight, experienced in certain Bach passages, characterised much, though not all, of the Four Ballades, op.10, of Brahms, one of its greatest kindred spirits. The first, in D minor, proved gravely beautiful, Ossianic in spirit, with tantalising hints already (1854) of the Schoenbergian future. Its rhetoric became surprisingly (yet faithfully) Lisztian before withdrawing into the shadows. In its D major sibling, it was Chopin’s turn to be revealed, not as an eccentric visiting stranger, but summoned from Brahms’s own material. It was an intimate, at times almost diffident portrait that led to more ardent, Schumannesque Romanticism. The B minor Intermezzo sounded in context as if its predecessor had been turned inside out, in a strange, Gothic transformation, only to turn itself inside out subsequently. All three seemed in some way to prepare the way for the fourth, in B major, a more mature Brahmsian butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. There was a deeper sadness here, which one might compare to Chopin, but which was in reality very much Brahms’s own. If there was a reluctance to fly freely in the sun, that was perhaps as much composer’s as the pianist’s. It was a markedly interior vision, which some may have felt a little too introverted, but I found it compelling. 

Liszt’s Beethoven symphony transcriptions are fascinating tributes, which take a peculiar combination of talents and insights to bring alive. The piano can of course only imitate the orchestra, but in some cases that can be a good thing. After all, one thing an orchestra cannot do is imitate an orchestra; it can only be one, at least before the later twentieth century. Here we heard the Seventh Symphony, which Levit gave (rightly, I think) as a symphony on the piano, not a sonata manqué. The chords announcing the first movement’s introduction necessarily sound different; Levit relished that difference with ear-catching detached playing, recapturing an element of surprise. And yet, thereafter, there was an increasingly Lisztian (and sustained) sound and style to chords and octaves, propelling us toward the exposition, whose provenance became unusually clear. The movement developed and returned as it should, yet heard anew. If anything, the coda sounded all the more of Weber’s ‘madhouse’. 

Even on the piano, the opening chord of the second movement sounded grey as the North Sea. It was given relatively swiftly, the marking Allegretto taken at Beethoven’s (disputed) word, without sounding rushed. Indeed, one felt as well as observed the processional element at work in all its multifarious glory—and dignity. Line was maintained throughout, and we were treated at times to just a little – a Goldilocks amount of – Lisztian grandiloquence. The ghostly quality to the fugato was spot on, making me keen to hear Levit in the third movement (and the rest) of the Fifth. Remarkable in its pianistic success, the scherzo’s performance was founded on great virtuosity that was nonetheless a mere beginning, a necessary given. Its Tiggerish quality and propulsion almost had one regret that Beethoven did not offer yet another reprise. The Trio relaxed, as of old, the Austrian pilgrims’ hymn truly felt as well as heard. 

It took my ears a little while to adjust for the finale: probably the most difficult movement to bring off, whether from orchestra or piano. I have heard some horribly merciless renditions, incomprehensibly praised, which have sacrificed the humanity without which Beethoven is traduced. Levit showed that one can have a thrilling ride, imbued with Lisztian spirit, which will ultimately grow into Beethoven’s too. His choice of encore was perfect, both in itself and for highlighting the contrast between Beethoven arranged for the piano and the composer’s own piano writing. The Adagio cantabile from the ‘Pathétique’ Sonata wedded lyrical impulse to Haydnesque roots in a performance at least as moving as anything heard previously.

Kozhukhin - Widmann, Schubert, Ligeti, and Liszt, 16 May 2024

Pierre Boulez Saal

Widmann: Idyll and Abgrund (Six Schubert Reminiscences for piano)
Schubert: Piano Sonata in G major, D 894
Ligeti: Études, no.13: ‘L’Escalier du diable’
Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor, S 178

Denis Kozhukhin (piano)

With this intelligently programmed and performed recital, Denis Kozhukhin reminded us what an interesting musician he is. Both halves presented a major piano sonata – two of the most celebrated and, in different ways, difficult in the repertoire – preceded by a more recent work either, in the first case, paying explicit reference to the earlier composer or, in the latter, holding something diabolically transcendental in common. 

Jörg Widmann’s 2009 Idyll and Abgrund, subtitled Six Schubert Reminiscences for piano, opened the programme. If its first ‘reminiscence’ certainly had melodic roots in Schubert, its harmonic world initially seemed closer to late Liszt, before heading in another direction altogether, heavy dissonant interventions in the treble sounding oddly like Schnittke. That composer also came to mind in the mode of expression of the second, though Schubert and indeed Brahms, as well as a more general (typically for the composer) relationship to German musical Romanticism were present. There were here and throughout so many ghosts that I cannot remember them all, and am not sure it would be helpful to list them even if I could. A charming waltz began, only to be partially obscured, yet soon returned to go a little haywire, pianist’s whistle and all. Kozhukhin offered a fine lilt, always idiomatic without sentimentality. There were starker passages. And surely that was Schubert’s final piano sonata I heard in the last movement, just before the close. But so what? Reference, allusion, or kinship were apparent, ‘meaning’ more allusive—and doubtless rightly so. 

Schubert’s own G major Sonata, D 894, followed. The first movement, Molto moderato e cantabile, was taken at no Richter tempo; how – why – would one imitate the inimitable? But it certainly took its lead from Schubert’s marking, as indeed did all four movements, in character as well as mere speed. A sense of sleepwalking, as in Thomas May’s programme note quotation from Alfred Brendel, was apparent, Schubert striding ‘across harmonic abysses as though by compulsion, and we cannot help remembering that sleepwalkers never lose their step’. Kozhukhin’s command of line certainly suggested this. One might, at any one moment, have been forgiven for thinking Schubert was not really in the business of development, but he was, through a stasis that was only apparent yet no less ‘felt’ for that. And he proved just as adept as summoning ghosts, albeit without any compulsion to name them. Form grew out of what we heard rather than being imposed upon it; that said, there was no doubting the moment of tonal return, nor the transformed nature of material thereafter. What a pity, then, that someone’s telephone went off at the first movement’s close, visibly disconcerting pianist and audience alike. The Andante received a similarly ‘interior’ reading, passages turning outwards where called for and not without violence. It made sense, again as if from deep sleep. This music can certainly be understood dialectically, yet it was less clear than with Beethoven that that would be the point. It came from a damaged world, a damaged psyche, Adorno’s Minima moralia coming to my mind, but showed great strength from within. The minuet asked and responded, the difference between question and response meaning all—both to pianist and composer. Its trio offered a vision of something beyond, perhaps heavenly, whilst unable or unwilling to let go of remaining, unbridgeable distance, as if a Bach musette found itself in the world of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, neither party knowing quite what to do. The final movement brought us back to earth, perhaps, whilst remembering what had just passed (and in truth, we had never really left). This was the wayward progress of music that wishes to approach Mozart, yet actually ends up further away. Might Kozhukhin have confronted the abyss more starkly? Perhaps, but his long, unbroken line told its own story. 

The thirteenth and longest of Ligeti’s Etudes, ‘L’Escalier du diable’, offered a strong pictorial sense of its titular inspiration without being bound by it, nor indeed by anything else other than a precision the composer would surely have admired. The craziness of its technical demands and their fulfilment were all part of the challenge—and the fun. Dynamic levels were as rock-solid as rhythm, a big, post-Romantic sound as present where required as interior unwinding. It was probably just my imagination, but I could have sworn a chord emerged, perfectly in keeping, as if from the world of Messiaen. In any case, the final resonance was surely one to rival Stockhausen. 

It made for an ideal curtain raiser to the Liszt B minor Sonata, which began with an almost modest precision that was actually more a case of knowing where the music must lead. That precision remained, as did tautness of conception, again with fine command of line to recall Schubert. There was no haze here, though, in a performance that was bright even when dark, and ever immediate. If there were sleepwalking here, it was of a more nightmarish quality. Kozhukhin did not shy away from rhetoric as such, the first statement of the second subject, for instance, highly declamatory, but form and, even on occasion, a certain formalism were more to the fore. Perhaps the performance, then, sprang from Ligeti in that sense too. Again, it was certainly not that Kozkuhkin could not spin a compelling, even spell-binding cantabile line; he could and did. Integration nonetheless always seemed his ultimate concern. Clarity of texture and purpose was admirable, even if I occasionally missed a little Romantic mystery. (Was that just me trying to have it all? Probably.) There were surprises, though, in the sense that new points of departure, the fugato a case in point, truly sounded as such, even when one ‘knew’. The true recapitulation sounded, again, with all the inevitability one could wish for. It was, perhaps, a more modernistic story than often, but that is inherent to Liszt. And on the very few occasions when the music threatened to escape even the most iron self-control, that is surely part of Liszt and Lisztian performance too. This sonata will never sound ‘perfect’; it is not Mozart and is not trying to be. It was something different from that and all the better for it. 

A moan: must audience members really tell each other loudly what an encore is when a musician begins to play it, or just as bad, give a stage-sigh of satisfaction? Well done: you have recognised Schumann’s Träumerei, one of the most celebrated and likely encores in the piano literature. Fortunately, Kozhukhin gave an honest account, beautifully voiced. To be fair, no one made such noises for the first encore, perhaps because – like me – they did not know what it was. Hymnal and, if I remember correctly, slightly modal, it had melodic and harmonic characteristics I might have guessed to be Russian. I wondered whether it might have ‘meant’ something beyond its notes; at any rate, Kozhukhin clearly believed in and winningly communicated those notes.

Salzburg Festival (1) - Volodos: Mompou, Liszt, and Scriabin, 18 August 2023

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Mompou: Musica callada, nos 1, 2, 27, 24, 25, 11, 15, 22, 16, 6, 21, 28 

Liszt: Ballade no.2 in B minor, S 171

Scriabin: Études in F-sharp minor, op.8 no.2; in B-flat minor, op.8 no.11; Préludes in E-flat minor, op.11 no.14; in B major, op.16 no.1; in E-flat minor, op.16 no.4; in B major, op.22 no.3; in B-flat minor, op.31 no.1; Deux Poèmes, op.63; En rêvant, op.71 no.2; Flammes sombres, op.73 no.2; Piano Sonata no.10, op.70; Vers la flamme, op.72

Image: © SF/Marco Borrelli

Opportunities are rare to hear the music of Federico Mompou, and from a pianist of the stature of Arcadi Volodos rarer still. My friend and colleague Erik Levi, who also wrote the excellent English-language programme essay for this recital, described Mompou to me as ‘Webern meets Satie’: a good and intriguing starting point. In this selection of twelve pieces from the twenty-eight that make up Musica callada (1959-67), the aphoristic Schoenberg also came to mind, though Mompou’s writing (and Volodos’s performance) tended to suggest brevity rather than aphorism. Melting tone, more forthright as and when necessary, and startling clarity and conviction were key to this performance, each piece seemingly haunted by what had gone before, whilst remaining very much its own utterance. A sense of song, of breath and of breathing too, informed even the more ‘external’ sounds: bells tolling, for instance. All seemed fresh, even provocatively so, every gesture counting. Melodic or not, with Debussy and Liszt often present and occasional appearances by Poulenc in old-French mode, this music will surely have won a good few new converts.

For me, the only real disappointment on the programme was Liszt’s Second Ballade. It began promisingly, Volodos’s colouristic wizardry transferred to a larger stage and scale. Some harmonies sounded strangely familiar, others entirely new. It was, to be sure, aballadic utterance, but where for me it increasingly fell short was in formal command. Volodos clearly has a strong affinity to what we might, with due Romanticism, call the Lisztian soul, but quite why things were happening when they were, what connected them with what had gone and what followed, remained elusive. The audience, though, went wild.

In Volodos’s wide-ranging, almost chronological selection from Scriabin’s piano music, he seemed absolutely at home, assembling and vividly communicating a programme that felt like a vast symphonic poem of its own, developing in technique and harmonic language, yet again strangely consequent on what had gone before. That was true of individual pieces too, from the two Études of 1894-5 onwards, the latter, in B-flat minor, sounding like the perfect love-child of Chopin and Tchaikovsky. Time was bent, yet direction was ever-clear, indeed clearer. Subtlety and detail were second to none, likewise tumult when it came (as often it did). As time passed, and Scriabin’s musical personality darkened and deepened, a sense of proximity to, perhaps even influence from, composers such as Debussy and Schoenberg heightened, Klingsor’s magic garden and its implications very much in the background, though perhaps that says as much about me as the composer (or pianist). This was extraordinarily eloquent and committed advocacy, and in pieces such as the Tenth Piano Sonata, with a formal command beyond question. We were taken not only vers la flamme, but through and beyond it.

‘Après un rêve’ – Despax: Poulenc, Fauré, Ravel, and Saint-Saëns, 1 July 2023

Wigmore Hall

Poulenc: Les Soirées de Nazelles
Fauré, arr. Despax: Après un rêve, op.7 no.1
Ravel: Gaspard de la nuit
Saint-Saëns-Liszt, arr. Horowitz: Danse macabre, S 555

Emmanuel Despax (piano)

By way of a CD launch, Emmanuel Despax gave a wonderful Saturday lunchtime programme, as deeply committed as it was unfailingly stylish, of French music at the Wigmore Hall. First came Poulenc’s Les Soirées de Nazelles, the composer’s 1930s ‘portraits’ or, as he a little confusingly also called them, ‘variations’, initially improvised for friends assembled by his countryside piano, introduced by a ‘Préambule’ and cadenza. That ‘preamble’, essentially a prelude, opened in Prokofiev-like manner, soon melting slightly to reveal a softer, yet never merely soft, Poulenc centre, all despatched with characteristic élan. Momentum sprang from Despax’s repeated notes – ‘Extrêmement animé et décidé’ – though he always maintained the impression of allowing due time and space; it was never hurried. The darker cadenza, albeit illuminated by shafts of musical light, gave a fine sense of extemporisation. Then came that parade of characteristic ‘variations’, the first delightfully dry, its successor, a full-bodied ‘La cœur sur la main’ turning to the heart. The composer’s indications for each were respected to the letter and, more important, in their spirit, exquisitely voiced, as if fruits of marriage between music of the French clavecinistes and Romantic preludes or character pieces. Scampering certainty and momentary doubt of ‘Le contentement de soi’; mock pomposity of ‘La suite dans les idées’: time in sinuous near-suspension, or at least elongation, in ‘Le goût du malheur’: by way of such delights, we turned to a second cadenza whose open fanfare seemed at first to suggest the Organ Concerto, again more an occasion for metrical, fantasia-like freedom than overt display, and a lightly summative ‘Final’ with a closing touch of something more darkly enigmatic. 

Despax’s own transcription of Fauré’s ‘Après un rêve’, which gave its name to the recital as a whole, sang beautifully in two piano registers, with a proper sense of the original and its words, yet without being unduly limited by them. As ‘itself’, the piano wove its magic around, a little in the line of Liszt. A Lisztian spirit of the transcendental variety is and was present also in Gaspard de la nuit, ‘Ondine’ beginning to shimmer in Fauré’s shadows—or rather, its waters did. A fine balance between the pictorial and something beyond, allure and (rightful) distrust, coolness and heat, is Ravel’s own, but here it was Despax’s too, all painted with the most atmospheric precision. The measured, inexorable tread of ‘Le gibet’ evoked the subjectivity of solitude in the midday sun. Then the flickering malevolence of ‘Scarbo’ burst forth, punctured yet never vanquished by pregnant silences. Virtuosity here is a sine qua non, yet was only the starting point for musical performance. 

Liszt’s transcription of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre, further embellished in 1942 by Vladimir Horowitz, emerged in context in duly diabolical fashion, and very much in nineteenth-century voice. Insistent and fantastic, and both as vivid and as virtuosic as Gaspard, it spoke with a freedom that suggested paraphrase yet was not: ideal for such repertoire. Debussy's ‘Clair de lune’ made for a magical encore postlude. This will clearly be a recording to savour.

Kantorow - Brahms, Liszt, and Schubert, 8 March 2023

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Brahms: Piano Sonata no.1 in C major, op.1
Schubert-Liszt: Der Wanderer, S 558/11; Der Müller und der Bach, S 565/2; Frühlingsglaube, S 558/7; Die Stadt; S 560/1; Am Meer, S 560/5
Schubert: Fantasy in C major, D 760, ‘Wanderer Fantasy’

Alexandre Kantorow (piano)

 

I have come a little late to the party for Alexandre Kantorow, the first French pianist to win gold medal in the Tchaikovsky Competition in 2019. (A French winner seems unlikely this year, for sadly obvious reasons.) This was my first encounter with Kantorow, but I certainly hope it will not be the last. His Queen Elizabeth Hall recital revealed both transcendental virtuosity, very much in the line of Liszt, but also a first-rate musical mind. 

Having more or less given up on the Brahms piano sonatas as not for me, it was gratifying to be shown how wrong I had been. Kantorow’s performance was one of those times when one heard a work with which one had long had difficulties, only to wonder what those difficulties could ever have been. Grabbing the first movement by the scruff of its neck, he took Brahms’s opening Hammerklavier references for the red herring they are, revealing a work emphatically rather than incidentally in bright C major, Beethovenian precedent instead furnished by the Waldstein Sonata. The second group proved properly tender, taking its leave from Schumann, yet in half-lights already strikingly mature. Muscularity and freedom were both readily apparent; so too was a coherence surprising not so much in itself, but rather in that it was achieved through a command of line that never took the easy, formalistic route and was all the more convincing for that. A turbulent development section swept us into a recapitulation full of poetic magic. The second movement was darkly Schubertian. At times, its freedom was such as to sound quasi-extemporised, yet it was always sure of where it was heading. Quietly surprising, it found powerful contrast in an energetic scherzo whose trio melted somewhat yet never unduly, before building equally – at least – in power. Like its predecessor movements, the finale might on the surface have seemed rhapsodic, yet was despatched in gloriously Romantic freedom crucial to a far-reaching conception of the whole, with all the technique required to bring that off. 

There followed a selection of five Schubert songs as arranged for solo piano by Liszt. How every one sang—and sighed, each different in character yet similar in virtues technical and more broadly musical. Veiled yet full of tone, Der Wanderer and Der Müller und der Bach spun narratives and fantasy worthy of both Schubert and Liszt, privileging neither, the first song of course preparing the way for Kantorow’s later performance of the Wanderer-Fantasy. Shades of Schubert impromptus, heard through a Lisztian prism, were manifest in Frühlingsglaube, albeit with decoration that could only be Liszt. Schubert’s mysteries in Der Stadt were multiplied by Liszt—and kept multiplying. Here was truly sepulchral Romanticism. Am Meer, poised like the song itself, between the stable and the hallucinatory, proved equally yet differently poignant, as if it were experiencing and yet revisiting at once. 

The Wanderer-Fantasy opened with brighter tone, recalling the opening of the Brahms—as, of course, did the key. It was no less freely virtuosic than either Brahms or Schubert-Liszt, and Kantorow again worked the magic of having us hear Schubert at least partly via Liszt, perhaps via Brahms too. Familiar themes and progressions sounded newly minted. Likewise the song at the fantasy’s heart sounded both ancient and newly conjured. Finely shaped whilst always sounding spontaneous, it culminated in twin crowns of fugato and coda that, understandably, left the audience keen to hear more.

Stemme/Svensson - Wagner, Liszt, Koch, Mahler, and Weill, 2 March 2023

Wigmore Hall

Wagner: Wesendonck-Lieder
Wagner-Liszt: Am stillen Herd aus Richard Wagner’s ‘Meistersinger’, S 448
Sigurd von Koch: Die geheimnisvolle Flöte
Mahler: Kindertotenlieder
Weill: Happy End: ‘Surabaya Johnny’; Nannas Lied; Youkali

Nina Stemme (soprano)

Magnus Svensson (piano)

What it is to hear a great voice such as Nina Stemme’s at close quarters. Doubtless there will be some – there always are – for whom this was not, according to their own arbitrary definition, ‘true Lieder singing’. (They probably said the same about Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, though would deny it now.) Such silly, anti-operatic snobbery aside, though, anyone actually listening to Stemme’s way with words, here at the Wigmore Hall just as on the stage at Covent Garden or Bayreuth, will have heard that it was precisely that, furthered by a voice that never needed to strain, yet which never sounded too big, and which sounded as if it could have gone on all night. 

The Wesendonck-Lieder are perhaps not the easiest place to begin, cold, but here was the hochdramatisch thing from the start. The size of Stemme’s voice was apparent, of course, but so too were seemingly endless reserves of breath. Hardly surprisingly, echoes – presentiments, really – of Tristan und Isolde were heard. And the leisure of the close to the opening ‘Stehe still!’ was indicative of an approach that could and did take its time, seeing no reason to rush, without even the slightest hint of dragging. Magnus Svensson proved a supportive pianist, but this was really Stemme’s show, ‘Der Engel’ beginning with relative intimacy, blooming at her behest, the piano in tandem. There was a little of Isolde on stage too, Stemme gazing into the distance in the piano introductions to ‘Im Treibhaus’ and ‘Träume’: not stagey, but rather poised. The former’s tessitura permitted a taste of what her Brangäne might have been like too. Ringing top notes in ‘Schmerzen’ and ‘Träume’ alike, the former leading to a truly exultant climax, the latter’s detailed colouring, each reiteration of the word ‘Träume’ subtly different, a joy in itself. If Svensson’s solo rendition of Liszt’s Meistersinger paraphrase proved a little stiff, freer the more it became Liszt proper, then it was a welcome opportunity to hear a true rarity. 

Another rarity was Sigurd von Koch’s 1916 song-cycle, Die geheimnisvolle Flöte, in a well-judged performance that might have been prepared for a repertoire work. Setting poems from Hans Bethge’s collection Die chinesische Flöte, known to many musicians from Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, Koch offers well-crafted responses, firmly rooted in German song tradition, yet with occasional hints of something more Debussyan (in harmony, rather than word-setting). Stemme and Svensson treated each of the five songs individually, with their own moods, yet also as part of a greater whole. The sadness of ‘Traurig Frühlingsnacht’ and the dark defiance of the closing ‘Herbstgefühl’ – no gentle autumnal – were especially captivating, the latter quite something in performance. 

Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder is, of course, absolutely central to the repertoire, more often heard in orchestral guise, yet with such clarity and spareness heard here perhaps sounding both more starkly modernist and closer to Bach. Stemme offered great clarity too, both of line and of purpose, though she was certainly not deaf to Mahler’s irony, a nice link to the Weill songs to come. If it were difficult not to think of this performance in some sense as ‘operatic’, it was certainly not so in a negative way. As in the Wesendonck-Lieder, Stemme was not afraid to colour with tuning, a sign of well-placed confidence as well as artistic judgement. She, as well as Svensson, used harmony – for instance on the words ‘O Augen’ in the second song – to evoke Wagnerian mystery. The intensity of ‘Wenn dein Mütterlein’ gave way to still greater sadness, again not without irony or indeed straightforward delusion, in ‘Oft denk’ ich sie sind nur augegangen’. True Mahlerian horror was unleashed in the closing ‘In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus’, the hallucinatory final stanza a proper heir to Winterreise. (Now there is an intriguing prospect.) 

Stemme’s use of words was crucial in Weill – with and without Brecht – in which three songs she continued to hold the audience in the palm of her hand. Svensson’s pianism seemed just the thing here too, idiomatic throughout. So vividly communicative was Nannas Lied that surely a listener without texts and without a word of German would have had a strong idea of the ‘Liebesmarkt’ and the challenges of moving beyond ‘siebzehn’. The tango rhythms of Youkali offered still more alluring cabaret, also – perhaps oddly – making me think we need to hear Stemme in Schoenberg, from the cabaret of the Brettl-Lieder to full-throated Erwartung. As an encore we heard the Broadway Weill: ‘My Ship’ from Lady in the Dark, despatched indeed with sails made of silk, Stemme’s English as perfect as her German. Wonderful!

Gerstein - Busoni and Liszt, 23 November 2022

Wigmore Hall

Busoni: Elegien, BV 249: ‘Nach der Wendung’; Sonatina seconda, BV 259; Berceuse, BV 252; Sonatina no.6 super Carmen, BV 284; Toccata, BV 287
Liszt: Études d’exécution transcendante, S 139

Kirill Gerstein (piano)  

This was a fascinating first instalment to Kirill Gerstein’s three-artist ‘Busoni and his World’ Wigmore Hall residence. Gerstein more than earned his fee, with a full first half of works by Busoni, gently and intelligently introduced from the platform, followed by all twelve of Liszt’s Transcendental Studies. He offered us much to ponder, much to be thrilled by, and much to look forward to later in the season. 

‘Nach der Wendung’, first of the Elegies, takes its leave, as you might expect, from late Liszt. A questing—it is almost impossible not to say ‘Faustian’—piece, it received a duly questing performance. Some writing is more tonal than other; Gerstein clearly communicated harmony and its implications. The quiet radicalism of its passage was conveyed with acute intelligence, whether it wandered into the clouds or down into the rumbling bass. Its introverted vision paved the way nicely for the Sonatina seconda. ‘Tonal oder Atonal?’ as Schoenberg would ask in the first of his Three Satires. Yes, no, or maybe, should probably have been the answer. Its opening bass line here strongly took a cue from Liszt, dissolving into the performing air, floating, resolidifying, and so on. Hearing material that would later find its way into Doktor Faust without the opera’s formal classicism is a fascinating experience. One senses a logic, even if one cannot define it. 

The Berceuse, published separately, is the final Elegie. Gerstein took it a little faster than often one hears it: rather, I think, to its advantage. Built and moulded to considerable emotional effect, it emerged more richly ambiguous than ever. The Carmen-Fantasy, another so-called sonatina, brought virtuosity, even hyper-virtuosity, more strongly to the fore. Layers of music, perhaps of meta-music too, were revealed and corroded, all within the Lisztian model of the paraphrase. Gerstein captured extremely well the piece’s ruminative quality: the composer, post-opera, extemporising on its themes. It was a turbulent, even violent necromancy we heard in the Toccata, its ‘advanced’ language no bar to high Lisztian grandiloquence. One gained an impression of multiple prisms, through music one could never quite pin down. The music from—or ‘to’?—Doktor Faust (related to the strange character, if one may call her that, of the Duchess of Parma) sounded as darkly elegiac and as dangerously sulphuric as I can recall. 

Brighter primary colours were to be heard from the off in Liszt himself. The opening Prelude seemed to strip away a gauze curtain we had not realised was there. Its virtuosic thrills provided quite the curtain-raiser. ‘Paysage’ offered seductive contrast, phrases beautifully leaned into. A Chopinesque—especially in the cadenzas—‘Mazeppa’ well illustrated Gerstein’s fine command of Lisztian rhetoric: foreign to our more cynical age in many ways, and yet relished for what it is. That quality of big-heartedness took us through pieces such as the ‘Vision’ and ‘Eroica’, vividly brought to life in themselves, yet also part of a greater trajectory. So eager can we sometimes be to defend Liszt against his cultivated despisers, we can forget how fine a thing it is simply, or even not so simply, to love his music. Not that there was anything sentimental to this performance; we loved the music through Gerstein’s intellectual as well as technical command. His turning of corners, as if revealing new vistas, occasionally brought Mahler to mind. Gerstein could charm too, as in ‘Ricordanza’. A bravura tenth study brought us to the flower-like harmonic blooming of ‘Harmonies du soir’, whose darker currents and sheer strangeness—surely attractive to Busoni—were certainly not undersold. The final study, ‘Chasse-neige’ was finely etched, seemingly according to a palette created before our ears.

The encore was Bach-Busoni: ‘Nun freut euch, lieben Christen gmein’. Busoni marks it ‘Molto scorrevole, ma distintamente’. That is unquestionably what we heard.

Levit - Brahms, Hersch, Wagner, and Liszt, 25 September 2022

Wigmore Hall

Brahms, arr. Busoni: Chorale Preludes, BV B 50
Fred Hersch: Variations on a Folk Song
Wagner, arr. Kocsis: Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I
Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor, S.178

Igor Levit (piano)

A typically thoughtful programme, brilliantly performed, from Igor Levit: the second half reprising that of his Salzburg recital in August, the first quite different, yet forming an equally coherent whole. First we heard the six of Brahms’s eleven late organ chorale preludes Busoni arranged for piano in 1902. The first, ‘Herzlich tut mich erfreuen’, rightly announced itself paradoxically, or better dialectically, both emphatically as piano music and yet also as ‘letting the music speak for itself’, in that most necessary of clichés. Musical processes behind and beneath the melody revealed two—sorry, three—great minds at work. Brahms’s arpeggiated half-lights emerged, as if from his own piano music; they were never imposed. That attentiveness to material—a sort of dual authenticity, though not in the debased sense the later twentieth century made all too current—marked out ‘Schmücke dich, o liebe Seele’ as more yielding, yet similarly straightforward, and the ineffably lovely ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’ as differently inward, Levit relishing Busoni’s modest interventions. The two preludes on ‘Herzlich tut mich verlangen’ were properly contrasted, the first speaking with a richness of tone apt for a more overtly Romantic outpouring (from both Brahms and Busoni), the second acting with ‘Es ist ein Ros entsprungen’ both to encase that passion, and coming closest to the Passions of Bach. It was deeply moving in its modesty, patience, and depth. Levit took his time, rather beautifully, with the heartbreaking ‘O Welt, ich muß dich lassen’. His dignified performance spoke with a distilled wisdom, like Brahms’s, that seemed to say all that need, perhaps all that could, be said. 

Fred Hersch’s 2021 Variations on a Folk Song followed. An initial statement of a time-honoured theme, here ‘Oh Shenandoah’, provided a connection rather than kinship with Brahms, but enough to have one think. Twenty variations followed. Harmonic recolouring came first to the fore, followed in what I think may have been the third variation by a change of mood to something less ruminative, more extrovert. A wide variety of treatments ensued, one (mostly) for the left hand standing out in dark, muscular fashion, as an heir to Romantic tradition, another insistent and ardent, perhaps a little after Liszt (to come). Others were more inward or floating. This was evidently music Levit had internalised, just as it this clearly represented a tribute from one pianist to another pianist—and vice versa. The principal language may have been forged in the jazz world, but it was generous in its frame of reference—and that generosity extended to spirit too.

Zoltán Kocsis’s transcription of the Prelude to Act I of Tristan was strenuous, big-boned, virtuosic, the emphasis placed very much on struggle, on becoming. Always directed to a goal that was never reached, its oppressive lack of resolution (in more than one sense) led us directly into a performance of Liszt’s B minor Sonata perhaps still more fiery, still more coherent than that I had admired a month earlier in Salzburg. It was similarly bold and questing, and of course more unremittingly virtuosic, virtuosity and rhetoric always means to an end rather than ends in themselves. Post-Beethovenian goal-direction was equally apparent, through rather than despite flexibility. Bringing us to the recapitulation, for instance, Levit triumphantly banished the false dawn of the preceding fugato to the fiery furnace. Form was a living, breathing, even diabolical thing. Liszt here was, quite rightly, both highly integrated and far-flung, Liszt’s essence grasped and communicated.

Detail mattered too: the return of those strange descending scales told us beyond any doubt that, were a single note in them to be changed, so too would the rest of the work. Never, not for one moment, could one doubt our guide knew where he was leading us. For Levit’s command of line, which one might well consider ‘Wagnerian’ in terms of unendliche Melodie, was not the least tool in communicating a pianistic sorcery on Liszt’s part that under the right hands is anything but rhapsodic. As for hands, had I not witnessed the performance with my own eyes as well as ears, I might have sworn there were four at work. This is a masterpiece of musical thought, of course, but it is equally piano music, and sounded as such, reminding me of Donald Tovey’s observation that Liszt’s piano music was that of someone who could not fail to make a beautiful sound when touching the keys. Beauty takes many guises, of course, but Liszt never, ever writes against the instrument. Nor, so it seems, does Levit ever play against it. A beatific close seemed, at least in retrospect, to necessitate the lovely yet plain-spoken encore, (as in Salzburg) Schumann’s ‘Der Dichter spricht’.

Salzburg Festival (4) - Levit: Bartók, Schumann, Wagner, and Liszt, 24 August 2022

Grosses Festspielhaus

Bartók: Out of Doors, Sz 81
Schumann: Waldszenen, op.82
Wagner, arr. Zoltán Kocsis: Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I
Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor, S.178

Igor Levit (piano)

Image: SF / Marco Borrelli

For this Salzburg Festival recital, Igor Levit offered a programme of piano music—and, in one case, orchestral music transcribed for the piano—rich in connections explicit and implicit, and beautifully balanced too. Programming is in many ways an art in itself, yet not of course quite in itself: the music needs to be performed at least as compellingly as it has been assembled. There was little problem in that respect here, given performances that never took the works in question for granted, always looked—and listened—afresh.

Bartók’s Out of Doors suite was a welcome choice to open. The drums and pipes of the opening piece gave neither pianist nor audience time to adjust. Poundingly percussive from the word go, it was always much more than that, though: melody and harmony, as ever in Bartók, at least as crucial as the initially startling melodic element. Levit understood and conveyed this, not only here but in the following pieces of very different, highly contrasted character. This suggested what a treat we might have in store from the Sonata and the Piano Concertos; let us hope they are only just around the corner. The ‘Barcarolla’ emerged as a mysterious heir to Chopin et al., those others certainly including Liszt, especially the Liszt of those lugubrious late Venetian works. I thought I heard a kinship to Prokofiev too: less expected, perhaps, but making a great deal of chronological sense. (Kinship need not mean influence in either direction.) Levit’s variety of articulation in service of the musical idea was just the thing to tease out its secrets. Delicately insistent, the ‘Musettes’ presented yet another winding, post-Romantic way, sharply contrasted by the night music of the fourth piece. Bells? Birds? Breezes? Beasts? Who knows? It was certainly Bartók, at any rate, the beating heart of the work as a whole. Independence of hands, the very foundation of Lisztian technique—well, one of the foundations, anyway—was crucial here in delineation and communication. The final piece was every inch the finale, early echoes of the opening taking us along a very different, dancing path. Fiendishly difficult and infectious, this was the piece with the most transcendental virtuosity, in Levit’s hands a veritable whirlwind.

Schumann’s Waldszenen is another set of pieces one might expect to hear more often than one does. Here, it breathed a post-Bachian air, not only in its counterpoint, but in melody, harmony, figuration, and much else. The introductory piece gently placed us in medias res: storytelling magic with an inwardness (Innigkeit) all Schumann’s own. The hunters of the second brought a degree of stormy release, ever precise, though, just as in Bach. Deceptively, captivatingly ‘einfach’ or simple, ‘Einsame Blümen’ offered as keen a note of fantasy as anything else: a note struck, in various ways, throughout the set, not least in a questing ‘Freundliche Landschaft’. In between, the dignified pathos, both directed and a little wayward, of ‘Verrufene Stelle’ hinted at a fugal mind deconstructed. A friendly wayside inn (‘Herberge’) and dignified ‘Vogel als Prophet’, the latter’s animation almost yet never quite suspended, took us into the sky before coming properly back down to earth in a rhythmically generative ‘Jagdlied’ that, in context, suggested memories of Bartók. Schumann’s epilogues are always things of wonder; here was a fond ‘Abschied’ indeed, its reluctance to close as touching as it was understandable.

Nietzsche famously declared he would not touch the score of Tristan und Isoldewithout wearing gloves. There was no doubting the dangers of its opening Prelude here, in a 1978 transcription by Zoltán Kocsis. More flexible than one would expect from an orchestra, it became a forerunner of late Liszt, ever struggling, ever becoming, endless in melody—until, that is, one realised that it was actually taking its cue from earlier Liszt, in the guise of the Sonata into which its close dissolved. We shall never finally disentangle the mutual influence and affinities of the two composers; here was a good reason perhaps not even to try, musical threads all the more dangerously intoxicating with ‘dies süsse Wortlein: und’: Wagner und Liszt.  

In that vein, the beginning of the exposition proper sounded like another chapter in the same story, beginning with Wagner, moving to those shockingly ‘new’ (even now) Liszt scales of the introduction, and new bursting forth in other, neue Bahnen, to quote Schumann on a young composer (Brahms) who certainly did not appreciate this work, allegedly falling asleep (!) when Liszt played it to him. That almost novelistic sense of pages, even chapters being turned was, I think, a particular characteristic of Levit’s performance, Liszt’s supreme Faustian bargain turned almost literally into a nineteenth-century page-turner. The composer’s formal concision can hardly be gainsaid here, but a complementary expansiveness was revealed as the other side to a coin of seemingly endless transition. There was time for grandiloquence as well as for silence; there was space for rhapsodic freedom and constructivism. (To misquote Dolly Parton, it takes a lot of organisation to sound that free.) With Liszt, especially here, several balls will often be in the air at any one time. The odd one may be dropped, but that is part and parcel of his generosity of character. With the structural outline firmly in place—there was no question as to the moment of recapitulation—there was no harm in occasionally pausing to ask a question, or even to admire the view. A divine comedy, a thoroughly Lisztian enterprise, was created before our ears. One had the sense, moreover, that it was a one-off, that a different tale would have been told on another occasion.

 With quiet dignity, the poet spoke (‘Der Dichter spricht’) for a Schumann encore. On a more modest yet not necessarily less eloquent level, Romantic rhetoric held us once again in its sway.

Berlin Festtage (2): Levit - Liszt and Mozart, 8 April 2022

Staatsoper Unter den Linden

Liszt (ed. Busoni): Fantasy on Themes from Mozart’s ‘Figaro’ , S 697
Mozart: Piano Sonata in B-flat major, KV 570
Mozart: Piano Sonata in C minor, KV 457
Liszt: Réminiscences de Don Juan de Mozart, S 418

Igor Levit (piano)  

Igor Levit’s contribution to this year’s Festtage offered us Mozart, both ‘as himself’ and through a Lisztian lens. First was Liszt’s rarely heard Fantasy on Themes from Mozart’s ‘Figaro’, properly the Fantasy on Themes from Mozart’s ‘Figaro’ and ‘Don Giovanni’, albeit in Busoni’s performing version, considerably truncated, it loses the Don Giovanni material entirely. Its skittish opening, particularly as performed here, put me slightly in mind—doubtless arbitrarily—of Henze’s ‘Three miniatures for piano’, Cherubino. (Someone, perhaps Levit, should perform them together some time.) Soon, however, a grander contagion spread, from composer and pianist alike, to the entire keyboard, exhibiting a clarity that can come only from transcendental virtuosity. In such music, essentially a slightly more permanent snapshot of Liszt improvising, one can fancy one hears the seeds of other, original Liszt pieces. Perhaps one does, but it is more likely simply to be the stock pianistic material on which Liszt drew. It was fascinating also to hear the junctures at which Liszt seems to prepare the way for music from Don Giovanni, only to swerve—or rather, via Busoni, to be swerved—in a different direction. Levit had the piano sing in all registers; a piano can do so, of course, be imitating the human voice, whereas our Western voices at least are more limited in range. Around that, all manner of pianistic adornment was spun. Levit’s command of Lisztian rhetoric, again as if improvising, though unquestionably faithful, proved second to none. He was not afraid, either, of a little vulgarity: something positively demanded by Liszt and yet to which some pianists find it difficult, even impossible, to accede. 

Mozart’s late B-flat major Sonata, KV 570, offers a very different kind of difficulty. Its spareness offers nowhere to hide, even by Mozart’s usual standards. I remained unsure about Levit’s way with the opening Allegro, very fast indeed, but it was clear and directed, with a proper sense of the development opening up a new harmonic world. The other two movements, to my ears, worked better, the Adagio sustained by a fine sense of line and scrupulous, yet never pedantic, articulation. The minor-mode section benefited from an understated yet clearly felt pathos. Here, Mozart’s cruel, achingly honest spareness was beautifully, meaningfully realised. So too was it in the finale, whose fast tempo did not preclude space to savour the composer’s clever imitation of solo and orchestral tutti. (B-flat major seems to have been one of his favoured keys for doing this, as witnessed by the ‘concerto’ finale to KV 333/315c.) Disorienting chromaticism was taken in the pianist’s stride. 

Levit thrived on the mood-swings of the C minor Sonata, KV 457, both as a whole and of its first movement in particular. The crucial thing, here admirably accomplished, was to have them cohere into a whole. If its dialectics looked forward to Beethoven, so they should; this was a motivically determined performance in the best sense. The concision of Mozart’s development section astounded, as it must. Levit had the tragic measure of his turn to the tonic minor in the recapitulation, as well as its ghostly coda. A spacious ‘Adagio’ followed, confirming Levit as one of the least ideological of musicians. His tempi, whether one agrees or not, are clearly born of his own understanding and vision for the music, not some absurd conception of ‘correctness’. Scrupulous with Mozart’s markings, he ensured this great aria was sung by a great piano-singer, blessed by no mean accompanist. The richness of Mozart’s modulations was fully savoured and conveyed. Even a telephone intervention was treated with good humour and incorporated into the particularity of good performance. Perhaps that incited the tragic intensity of the finale; more likely, it would have been there anyway. At any rate, this extraordinary conclusion to an extraordinary work, was unleashed rightly, with a C minor daemon to rival that of Beethoven.

Levit relished, unsurprisingly, the Stone Guest opening to Réminiscences de Don Juan, putting it, crucially, to pianistic, dramatic, and more broadly musical work. If Daniel Barenboim were in the audience, I should like to think he would have approved (likewise his hero, Furtwängler). Liszt’s work emerged as the masterpiece it is (with due regard to the Figaro Fantasy). Transitions, as finely judged as they sounded spontaneous, were of the greatest importance here. So too was Levit’s mastery in having the piano once again sing—and, in ‘Là ci darem la mano’, seductively at that. All manner of technical strengths and achievements were present and correct, but one barely noticed them in themselves, which is just as it should be, Lisztian virtuosity being ultimately a musical tool to vanquish mere virtuosity. Common ground between Mozart’s and Liszt’s major-minor dialectics was heightened to properly diabolical effect. The quiet dignity and resolve of Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s Chorale Prelude, Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland, made for a perfect encore.