Uchida - Beethoven, Schoenberg, Kurtág, and Schubert, 7 March 2025

Royal Festival Hall

Beethoven: Piano Sonata no.27 in E minor, op.90
Schoenberg: Three Piano Pieces, op.11
Kurtág: Márta ligaturája
Schubert: Piano Sonata no.21 in B-flat major, op.posth., D 960

Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

An evening with Mitsuko Uchida is rarely less than a privilege, and this was no exception. One audience member at the start seemed to take the idea a little too far, resolutely continuing to film her despite verbal and gestural requests to stop. An usher had to walk across the hall and point a sign forbidding use of telephones in the person’s face. Extraordinary! What with that and an onslaught of coughing that again occasioned requests in vain from the platform to desist, we certainly experienced the worst of live performance. Fortunately, there was enough of the best to compensate. 

The first item on the programme, Beethoven’s E minor Sonata, op.90, took a while properly to get going (a state of affairs perhaps not entirely unrelated to the case of the manic telephone user). Contrasts, especially dynamic contrasts, were immediately present. More broadly, the strange, wonderful world of Beethoven on the cusp of ‘lateness’ was with us. If some of the first movement in particular was a little brittle, that was not entirely inappropriate for this fractured world. Accentuated by very sparing use of the pedal, much of it entirely unpedalled, here was a Beethoven that was anything but comfortable or routine, even if I sometimes felt a slight lack of the continuity that underlies discontinuity. An almost Schubertian intimacy to the close, presaging the second half of the recital, came close to erasing any such reservations. The second movement seemed to breathe the air already of the late Bagatelles, in particular their lyricism, even when turned outward. Occasional technical faltering was of little import; the crucial things were engagement with and expression of Beethoven’s truculent humanism. 

Voice-leading in the first of Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces seemed in context to take its leave not only from Brahms but directly from Beethoven. So, indeed, did much else: contrasts now here become fully dialectical; melodic fragments wending their necessary yet sometimes difficult way; and harmony, yes harmony, too. Above all, there was here a not entirely dissimilar obstinacy—and nobility of spirit. Formal command was unquestionable, as founded on harmony as, say, the Beethoven of Daniel Barenboim (or Wilhelm Furtwängler). Much the same could be said of the second piece, over which the spirits of Wagner and Liszt hovered still more clearly. The third felt very much like the final movement of a ‘sonata’ of a dark variety that was yet possessed of magical chiaroscuro. 

The second half opened with Kurtág’s 2020 miniature Márta ligaturája, written for cimbalom, but here played directly from what seemed to be small manuscript pages (presumably copies), rendering the tribute to the composer’s beloved wife Marta all the more moving. Again, harmony and voice-leading seemed to pick up from where we had left off, only all the more distilled. If kinship with Schoenberg’s op.11 came across with particular strength, the emotional import came closer to his evocation of funeral bells for Mahler in the last of the Six Piano Pieces, op.19. Harmonies, not least pristine major chords, surprised and beguiled. 

Schubert’s final piano sonata followed less attacca than might have been the case, given the audience’s inability to keep quiet. The opening was nevertheless a thing of magic, possessed of seemingly intimate dynamic gradations, strength lying in intimacy and fragility, in persistence. This movement, indeed the sonata, as a whole reminded us what happiness can be built on pain, and vice versa. The last thing one needs here is a maudlin path, tempting though it may be. (I recall my own youthful attempts.) Instead, Schubert’s nobility of utterance was treasured, allowing it to speak ‘for itself’, however illusory that performative idea might be in practice. Ambivalence ran deep, especially in oscillation between major and minor. The recapitulation was, quite properly, a second development: one of a very different nature from those of Beethoven, one that seemingly never gave him a moment’s thought. The sound of Uchida’s chords in the coda would have been worth the price of admission alone 

Beautifully judged in tempo, as in all else, the slow movement neither dragged nor was rushed. It built; it sang; it said what needed to be said. The revelation of C-sharp major silenced any questions about how to understand it enharmonically and in relation to the tonality of the piece as a whole; Schubert, Uchida, and we knew.  A light-footed scherzo, if not quite lifting the clouds, suspended them for a moment. Its trio’s ambiguity, strange even by Schubert’s standards, duly registered, thus paving the way for the manifold, still deeper ambiguities of the finale, its decidedly non-Beethovenian subjectivity simply present, immanent. That said, there was here too a decidedly human, as well as humanist, obstinacy that seemed to bind together all the compositional voices on this programme: in this case, both aptly and surprisingly, in the returns of the rondo theme and the alternative, fleetingly Mahlerian vistas of the episodes.

MCO/Uchida - Mozart and Janáček, 1 February 2025

Royal Festival Hall, London, 1.2.2025 (MB)

Mozart: Piano Concerto no.18 in B-flat major, KV 456
Janáček: Mládi for wind sextet
Mozart: Piano Concerto no.21 in C major, KV 467

Mitsuko Uchida (piano, director)
Mahler Chamber Orchestra

Mitsuko Uchida’s series of Mozart piano concertos with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra reaches nos 18 and 21, on this occasion sandwiching an outstanding performance from MCO soloists of Janáček’s Mládi. If KV 456 took a little time to settle – its first movement a little too ‘neutral’ in character – then its later movements and the whole of KV 467 witnessed pianist and orchestra alike on excellent form. 

B-flat major is a funny key. My ears ‘tuned’ by orchestral tuning, I could not help but notice its flatter character. Even beyond that, though, that first movement sounded somewhat subdued. The MCO strings offered more extroverted playing in some tutti passages; there were gains too in the intimacy and the need properly to listen. It was only later on, though, that I really felt the music’s inherent drama, though tempo and balance could not be faulted. A barrage of coughing notwithstanding, the opening of the slow movement suggested the subtle tragedy of a great seria aria, and that sense only increased with its passage. There have doubtless been more overtly Romantic readings, but the MCO’s relative understatement did not undersell; nor did Uchida’s dignified response, voice-leading and harmony already pointing toward Mozart’s later years. Orchestral Furies vied with Orphic pleas, leading to a mesmerising close in which time stood still and once again moved—for it could do no other. In the best sense, that drama hung over a finale that truly smiled – rarest of delights – though sterner moments were equally moving. A slip from Uchida went for little; if anything it enhanced the sense of deeply human music-making. 

It is difficult not to regret a relative lack of concert music from Janáček, though certainly not at the cost of his operas. In any case, Mládi showed us how intimately connected are both ‘sides’ to his output, the music breathing the air of the late operas, instruments assuming the roles of dramatic characters, as if in anticipation of the music theatre of composers such as Birtwistle. As characteristic as it was compelling, a kaleidoscope of emotions was unleashed in the first movement, only to be added to or deepened in its successors. The second emerged as if the composer’s counterpart to that in the preceding piano concerto, its multiplicity of inflections and incitements, moods both shifting and abruptly changing, highly dramatic throughout. As bubbly as they were mysterious, the third and fourth were not only dramatically consequent but blessed by tremendous, unfailingly eloquent wind playing. 

The C major Piano Concerto, KV 467, had the second half to itself. From the off, the orchestra – still on the small side – sounded more energised than at the start of the earlier concerto, as did Uchida’s direction. A larger wind section made its presence felt, as did the commitment of the MCO strings—and of course Mozart’s (natural) trumpets and drums. Phrasing, mood, detail: all came into grater focus. Mozart’s oscillation between major and minor structured an emotionally engaging tonal drama, replete, where called for, with imperious C major ‘public’ grandeur. I assume the cadenza, conceived on a grander scale and inflected with greater modernity than those for the B-flat concerto, was Uchida’s own; at any rate, I did not recognise it. 

In the slow movement, the strings again were at least equal partners, whether in their celebrated pizzicato passages or bowed music with meaningfully varied vibrato. A black and white pearl, one might say, of a movement. The tempo, if a little faster than once might have been the case, felt right. Mozart’s music sang and bewitched, in a performance that seemed to conceive his writing in a single breath. At times, I found the finale just a little hard-driven, at others, it scampered delightfully. Uchida’s collegial music-making – rarely did I think of her as a ‘soloist’ – nonetheless proved throughout a treat.

‘Salonen: The Finale’: Uchida/Philharmonia - Bach, Salonen, and Beethoven, 10 June 2021

Royal Festival Hall

Bach (attrib.), arr. Klemperer: Bist du bei mir, BWV 528
Bach, arr. Webern: A Musical Offering, BWV 1079: Fuga (2. Ricercata) a 6 voci
Bach, arr. Berio: The Art of Fugue BWV 1080: Contrapunctus XIX
Bach: Partita no.3 in E major for solo violin: Prelude
Salonen: Fog (world premiere of orchestral version)
Beethoven: Piano Concerto no.3 in C minor, op.37

Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

Benjamin Marquise Gilmore (violin)

Philharmonia Orchestra

Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)

Images: Luca Migliore

It should have been a bitter-sweet moment: the Philharmonia returning to live performance, yet also its farewell to Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of thirteen years, Esa-Pekka Salonen. It doubtless was in some ways, but there was a feeling of hope here too. Hope may be the cruellest of gifts: it dies last, as Donald Tusk was wont to remind us. In one of the many outstanding performances I heard from the orchestra and Salonen during his tenure, Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero, the Beethovenian message of Fidelio was, after all, decisively turned on its head for the twentieth (and twenty-first) century: ‘La speranza … l’ultima tortura’.


And yet, Beethoven, notwithstanding banishment during the clash of anniversary year and pandemic, is still with us. So is the partnership of Salonen and Philharmonia, as he becomes the orchestra’s Conductor Laureate. And so too is that orchestra’s great history, which, to quote Salonen (responding to a spoken and filmed tribute from the orchestra), seems to learn its ‘tradition … through osmosis … like a biological process, certainly beyond words’. That too was how he had connected with his illustrious predecessors: Strauss, Furtwängler, Karajan, and of course ‘Dr Klemperer’. But that in itself could never have been enough, for ‘communal experience has been missing.’ For many of us, as for Salonen, the Internet ‘doesn’t quite work’ in this way. ‘It has to be this moment. You, and us, and the distinction between you and us disappearing.’ It was the return of that experience, ultimately, that gave us hope, not torture.


We opened with Bach, whom Salonen likened to Shakespeare, every generation having taken its own look at this music, interpreting and even mutilating it. First came Klemperer’s orchestral transcription—or should it be arrangement? We could spill endless ink over that alone—of Bist du bei mir, thought at the time to be Bach’s, now known to have been composed by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel for his opera Diomedes and merely collected by Bach for Anna Magdalena’s celebrated Notebook. Salonen had heard it once on the radio and had been determined to get his hands on the score: a difficult task since it was owned by a private collector. We make, find, and invent our own Bach—constantly. This string version, made for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, flowed with grace, beauty, and enormous clarity. There was nobility too, not least in, dare I suggest, the almost Elgarian sound of the Philharmonia’s cellos. Somehow it seemed all the more fitting that this was not Bach, but something he cherished and enabled us to cherish. There is hope in that.


The celebrated Webern transcription—I am tempted to say re-composition—from the Musical Offering followed without a break. As Salonen had said earlier, notes sounded like stars in the sky: connected, yet separate. How they are connected is the thing—or rather, one of the things. The closer one listens, the more one discerns. Players must join the dots: and they did, music ricocheting across the stage, connecting itself, the players, and us. Again, the flow was measured and increasingly flexible, gathering pace and falling back—as in Salonen’s recording with the LA Philharmonic. It is a flexibility we may call ‘Romantic’, yet which is in truth as much Bach’s, Webern’s, Salonen’s, or music’s.

Berio’s version of the unfinished fugue from the Art of Fugue sounded darker, at least for much of its progress. It sounded both ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ too, less radically interventionist, so much so that the sound of a saxophone came as quite a shock. (Klemperer substituted saxophone for trumpet in an early, pre-Philharmonia recording of the Second Brandenburg Concerto.) There was a feeling of that starry sky opening up to reveal the very music of the spheres, Bach’s music growing—being grown—with all the patience in the world and beyond. And then it began to turn, to take off, to suggest the air of more than one other planet. As Bach was left behind, music became something else entirely: dependent and independent of ‘tradition’, whatever that may be.


The Prelude to Bach’s E major Partita was heard from above (the Royal Box): given to the stage as much as to the audience by concert-master Benjamin Marquise Gilmore. Once more, we heard something of the essence of Bach: flexible and regular, balanced and directed, simple and complex, sung and instrumental—in work and performance. Salonen’s Fog responded. Initially composed for ensemble for Frank O. Gehry’s (title derived from initials) ninetieth birthday, and now expanded for orchestra, it recalls the first music ever heard in Disney Hall. It was a moment Salonen had wanted to ‘embellish upon’. And how—in a fantastical recreation, slightly sinister and unquestionably magical, poised between mechanism and the spontaneously woven. Were those ghosts in the machine, or machines in the ghosts? The general answer seemed to be: why choose? Bach rarely did. There was overt process to be heard—post-Ligetian as much as post-minimalist?—that felt somehow oppressed, indeed as if by the fog of the title. Surely all those many years of experience as conductor as well as composer—in this case, from Salonen’s celebrated 1983 debut with the Philharmonia in Mahler’s Third Symphony—made their way, lightly and without fuss, into this performance. Descriptions of events may sound incongruous: a piano cadenza came seemingly out of nowhere, yet also out of somewhere, inciting a wash of well-nigh post-impressionist sound; unexpected orchestral riffs with hand drum beats; solo violin and flute duetting. And yet, they did not feel so. All the time, the clouds rained Bach, more or less explicitly. Like Bach’s music, work, performance, and our listening seemed to grow both in simplicity and complexity, and in connexion.

 

Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto had been the first piece Salonen and Mitsuko Uchida played together. It made for a fitting finale here. The first Classical music we heard—all the more Classically Mozartian given forces necessitated by social distancing—sounded, if you will forgive the cliché, newly minted. That fabled, almost Boulezian clarity was once again present, likewise the Philharmonia’s cultivation of orchestral tradition. There was plenty of hushed mystery as well as wide-eyed awe. Post-Mozartian sadness turned to post-Mozartian vehemence: the tragedy of modernity, that we want Mozartian perfection yet cannot reach it. (We even begin to wonder whether Mozart did.) It was all the more tragic for being softly spoken. And then Uchida’s entry: defiant yet soon sad too. This was to be chamber music writ large, in an unhurried, flexible performance of great wisdom from all concerned. It was music-making to give no option other than to listen, to remind us why we were there. At its heart, of course, stood the Beethovenian humanity we have so longed for, and been denied, these past fifteen months. There was Klemperian orchestral granite too, as well as many of the virtues the elderly Klemperer admired in the young(ish) Boulez. Uchida’s shaping of phrases assumed the mantle of inevitability, though only in retrospect; for looking—listening—forward, all was to play for. That, literally, was hope, in an almost Newtonian tonal cosmos that may no longer be ours, but which can still immediately speak to us. I fancied at one point that the cadenza might metamorphose into the Emperor; but no, not every beautifully voiced E-flat chord leads there. Beethoven’s C minor daemon possessed the coda: this was the real thing, no doubt.


In the slow movement, we heard the rapt voice of experience—and once more of hope. The sincerity of orchestral response to that piano opening took on an almost religious—versicle and response—quality. New vistas were opened up by solo woodwind. The music flowed like a great river, yet was most revelatory in its whispered confidences, no matter from whom. It was rounded off beautifully, preparing for the next chapter, yet offering a lingering look back too. Sometimes, Orpheus gets to keep Euridice. Returning to C minor for the finale, we heard a Klemperian doggedness that knew not all dances are light, and that persistence is not the least quality in bringing forth joy. It was persistence in the return of the rondo theme, in fascinating, dialectical combination with the onward tread, hop, and skip of the Philharmonia bass, that drove this movement. It was quite unlike any other performance I have heard: perhaps not for every day, perhaps not to be repeated, but is that not what performance is truly about?


As an encore, ‘what Esa-Pekka wanted’, Uchida treated us to the second of Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces, op.19. Here, persistence again paid off, the resistance of that repeated major third (G-B) compelling music ‘itself’ both to ravish and dissolve—and yet remain. There is hope in that too; there must be.

Salzburg Mozartwoche (5): MCO/Uchida - Mozart, 27 January 2020

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Piano Concerto no.17 in G major, KV 453

Flute Quartet no.1 in D major, KV 285

Piano Concerto no.22 in E-flat major, KV 482

Chiara Tonelli (flute)

Alexi Kenney (violin)

Béatrice Muthelet (viola)

Frank-Michael Guthmann (cello)

Mahler Chamber Orchestra

Mitsuko Uchida (piano, conductor)

Now for the third of three orchestras during my Salzburg visit. Following the Vienna Philharmonic and Camerata Salzburg, it was now time for the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, directed from the keyboard by Mitsuko Uchida. Each of these ensembles offered differences in approach, though too much need not be made of that; there was certainly nothing perverse, nor unwelcome. Perhaps there was a little more in the way of ‘period’ sound to aspects of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra’s performance: only really, though, in certain aspects of articulation. Immediacy was unquestionable, notes veritably flying from string bows. It was, moreover, instructive to hear Mozart’s gorgeous woodwind writing in the context of earlier chamber concerts in the series. For this was to be no more a display of puritanism than of any other form of egotism. All orchestras, all performances more broadly Cultivated, transparent, and in many ways more big-boned – in part, yet only in part, the Mozarteum acoustic – than what we had heard in earlier concerts, the G major Piano Concerto’s opening tutti met, perhaps, with a surprisingly soloistic response from Uchida: more overtly articulated than, say, Daniel Barenboim with the VPO, but also standing at times in greater opposition to the orchestra. Harmonic surprises registered with dramatic immediacy, not least the crucial intrusion of the flattened submediant, E-flat, in the run-up to the cadenza.

Warm and dark, a tragic edge to the MCO’s strings in the central Andante proved just as important as the Elysian delights savoured from its woodwind soloists. Did Uchida’s limpid piano entry signal reconciliation? Perhaps. If so, not yet, however, for there was some way to go in so vividly conceived an instrumental drama. Indeed, the sense of grief increased, not only in the minor mode, rendering consolation, when it came, all the more necessary and moving. In that, the cadenza proved a fine microcosm of the whole. It can be tempting to take the finale too fast. (A brief glance at later note values should be enough, yet alas is not always.) There was no question here, however, in a reading alert to this music’s very particular trajectory. Papageno must be reached, as opposed to nonchalantly presuming his company from the outset. The piano sparkled, never garbled; one heard its notes, no mere effects. Likewise, of course, the orchestra, whether in delectable oboe solos or repeated, generative violin figuration. Mozart’s minor-mode chromaticism reminded us once again – as had Uchida’s earlier balance between horizontal and vertical – of the music’s Schoenbergian tendencies, necessary preparation for an exhilarating final section, E-flat once again the propulsive grit in the finest of oysters.

There followed a charming performance, from MCO principals, of the First Flute Quartet: elegant and airy, with no attempt to make the music into something that it is not. The invention of the first-movement development section was a joy to hear – and, so it seemed, also to play. Structure became dynamic form, especially so at the moment of return, highlighting how all had been transformed by what had already passed. There was no underlining, though, nor any need for it. A central dance of blessed spirits led to some rebellious moments and thereby straight into the finale. Imbued with a proper sense of joy and release, if it sounded at times close to Haydn, that is only because it should.

I had a few doubts concerning the performance of KV 482, though could not help but applaud Uchida’s unwillingness to be swayed by fashion. Grander, statelier than one might generally hear, its first movement certainly afforded space to listen. What I missed, however, was the formal dynamism that a musician such as Barenboim brings to this music, its structure never quite taking flight in that – or another – way. There was nevertheless something splendidly distinctive to the grandeur of orchestral sweep and indeed to the dark-hued Romanticism of parts of the cadenza (Uchida’s own), indicative of the contrasts to be heard elsewhere. Likewise the deliberate tempo adopted for the slow movement, in combination with withdrawn string vibrato indicative, perhaps, of Orpheus taming the Furies. Who was Orpheus, though? Piano or wind? The latter were a little jaunty at times, jarring for me with the overall conception. That said, the pathos of the movement’s closing bars proved quite irresistible. Such doubts were dispelled, however, in a finale presented with that elusive yet unquestionable sense of Mozartian ‘rightness’, save perhaps for some of Uchida’s ornamentation during the Andantino cantabile episode. Its high spirits brooked no compromise between weight and energy. For an encore, an ineffably lovely, strikingly personal account of the slow movement from the C major Piano Sonata, KV 330/300h could not have been more welcome.

Uchida - Schubert, 7 December 2018

Royal Festival Hall

Piano Sonata in A minor, D 537

Piano Sonata in C major, D 840

Piano Sonata in B-flat major, D 960

Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

Who would willingly pass up the opportunity to hear Mitsuko Uchida play Schubert? Not I; nor did I regret having taken it up. That said, an artist whose gallery of virtues would generally be held to include a high degree of technical consistency did not always quite live up to that side of the bargain. During the C major Sonata, D 840, Uchida struggled at times, visibly and audibly distracted by an especially active bronchial audience contingent (not to mention at least two mobile telephone interventions). Edge-of-the-seat turbulence of the cross-rhythms part-way through the finale of the B-flat major Sonata, D 960, was not entirely to be ascribed to interpretative choice and insight. There were a few other such instances. Musical and more broadly humanist virtues nevertheless consistently won out. What we heard was some way from perfect; yet whilst perfection may often – often not, too – prove a laudable quality, rarely if ever should it prove an end in itself.

The recital opened with the A minor Sonata, D 537. A vehement, almost Beethovenian opening – yes, I know the temptation to compare and contrast with Beethoven is often better avoided; nevertheless… – subsided beautifully, yes, but more to the point, meaningfully. Schubert’s contours were well traced throughout this first movement and beyond; or rather, they were brought to life in performance, ‘traced’ suggesting something too passive. This sounded, rightly, very much as young man’s music. (That all of Schubert’s music is, strictly, a young man’s music is really neither here nor there.) What particularly struck me on a micro-level, was how Uchida’s leaning in to phrases always sounded just ‘right’: never quite the same, always subtly different, according to context. The movement’s closing bars sounded very much imbued with the spirit of Mozart of his A minor Sonata, KV 310/300d. Uchida judged the tempo and mood – the same thing here, really – of the second movement just right. The degree of halting uncertainty again seemed spot on, though I can imagine some finding it a little mannered. A ‘lateness’ that belied the actual year of composition (1817) worked well, icy winter winds very much the thing. There was certainly no doubting her command of the overall line. The finale again opened vehemently, yet in no sense as a repeat of the first movement; context and experience were all here. Perhaps some of what ensued might have benefited from greater variety of touch, but Uchida’s dream-like, at times almost stream-of-consciousness approach was compelling in its way.

If the C major Sonata suffered more than its companions from technical mishaps, it also proved to me the most intriguing interpretatively. Uchida’s opening phrase was floated with an indeterminacy that seemed to hurl a gentle (!) lance into the music-historical future: to Liszt, even to Debussy. Tonality, general and specific, evolved – and yet also often remained uncertain, Liszt again coming to mind, as indeed he did in certain rhetorical gestures. The first movement’s closing bars, luminous and numinous, lingered long in the memory. Schubert’s apparent inability, or unwillingness, to climax proved deeply moving. Was the Romanticism of the second movement more ‘conventional’? Perhaps, but so what? If so, it were only in such extraordinary company. Uchida’s great achievement here, I think, was to draw one in, to compel one truly to listen. Then the music developed in its own, strange, quite inimitable way.

The B-flat Sonata sounded from the outset more settled – at least until those slips during the finale. Resigned? I am not sure; this was certainly not Sviatoslav Richter. Perhaps ‘content’ might be better. Schubert’s music took wing more readily than earlier: in large part a reflection of the material, of course, but perhaps not entirely. Structure and form were certainly clearer throughout, notwithstanding an egregious telephonic intervention shortly before the first movement exposition repeat. An ineffable sadness during the development section emerged very much from its harmony: the minor mode, yes, but Neapolitan and other chromatic colourings in particular. The return was unruffled but certainly not unchanged. And it continued to develop, of course; or perhaps, better, to change, ‘develop’ in this work sounding almost indecently Beethovenian a charge. The rarity of key, tonality, and mood in the slow movement was established immediately, quite without preciosity. Again, Uchida’s command of large-scale structure and form – that is, dynamic delineation of structure in time – were key to her success here. The scherzo is, for me, the most difficult of four very difficult movements to bring off in performance. No such fear here: inner, presumed fragility encased, even entombed, in a finely judged scampering pretence at insouciance. The obstreperous quality of its trio, rightly different from Beethoven’s truculence, seemed in a decidedly peculiar way closer to a reification of Haydn. Many of those qualities continued, indeed developed, in a finale possessed of just the right degree both of exploration and ‘rightness’. A wordless Schwanengesang, whatever the occasional stumble, ultimately did what it should. Music, after all, is human rather than divine.

Uchida/Grosz/BPO/Rattle - Mozart, Walton, and Kodály, 6 October 2017

Philharmonie

Mozart: Piano Concerto no.27 in B-flat major, KV 595

Walton: Viola Concerto

Kodály: Suite: Háry János

Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

Amihai Grosz (viola)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Simon Rattle (conductor)

Try as I might, I could not work out the idea behind the programming of this concert. In practice, it brought us the Berlin Philharmonic – and Simon Rattle – at their best after the interval, in works by Walton and Kodály, whereas far and away the best music came before that interval. Not that there was anything wrong with the orchestra’s playing, or indeed with Rattle’s conducting, in Mozart’s final piano concerto, but there was something of a sense of compromise, as if orchestra and conductor – arguably soloist too – were pulling slightly in different directions. There was none, or very little, of the mannerism that has often so disfigured Rattle’s conducting of Classical music; that, after all, is hardly Mitsuko Uchida’s style. But a very small orchestra – only eight first violins – sounded a little plain of string tone, with the true orchestral delights coming from a fabulous woodwind section. The first movement lacked the autumnal quality puritans tell us we – and it – should eschew, but nor was it especially vernal; indeed, even Uchida’s playing, although excellent, had a degree of neutrality to it. That worked rather well in the development section, when her passagework sounded entwined around ravishing oboe and bassoon solos. Indeed, the orchestra had sounded enlivened as soon as she entered. And Uchida’s was a distinguished performance overall, as one would have expected. The slow movement was beautifully shaped, never unduly moulded. It spoke and sang with simplicity, however secondary. Here, Uchida continued to ornament her lines, but far more so than earlier on: ever tasteful, indeed ever delightful. The finale was finely articulated from all concerned, Uchida’s command of line especially noteworthy. There was much to commend, much to enjoy; comparisons can wait until another day, or indefinitely.

The Berlin Philharmonic sounded like a different orchestra after the interval; of course one would not expect Mozart to sound like Walton, or vice versa, but it was more than that. Richly Romantic, there was no denying this sound’s ‘fit’ to the repertoire. (Interestingly, and to my mind highly surprisingly, Karl Böhm had conducted its Berlin Philharmonic premiere in 1958, with William Primrose, whilst the 1961-2 revision, heard here, received its first – and until now, only – performance from the orchestra in 1969 from Giusto Cappone and John Barbirolli). Just two weeks earlier, we had heard Máté Szűcs in the Bartók Viola Concerto; now it was the turn of the orchestra’s other principal viola, Amihai Grosz. If the Bartók is far from my favourite piece by that composer, comparison with Walton’s concerto, in whichever version, does the latter no favours. If, once again, I found myself far from convinced by a work that has a tendency to sound like bits of film music stuck together, then it was not for want of trying from Grosz, the orchestra, or Rattle. The vaguely jazzy sections and those that sound somewhat like Prokofiev are perhaps the most convincing parts of the first movement; they certainly sounded splendid in themselves here. Grosz’s double-stopping, moreover, was to die for. Stravinskian rhythmic precision made its mark in the second movement. All concerned made a great effort to unify the work in its finale. Grosz’s lyricism here – and not just his – made a gorgeous sound indeed. His Reger encore, however – I am not sure offhand from which of the Suites it came – was very much more to my taste. It was lovely to see Rattle sneak in at the back of the stage and sit at the piano to hear it too.

I tried too with Kodály’s Háry Janos Suite. Perhaps trying was the problem, for it is fun enough in its way, if perhaps a little laboured in the fifth movement. The Prelude is in many ways impressive – and certainly proved so in performance, lower strings offering more than a hint of Bluebeard Bartók (in which I had heard them earlier this year). There are worse models, far worse models! The festive quality to the Vienna Musical Clock movement was relished. And violist Naoko Shimizu played her opening to the third movement, the ‘Song’, with a beauty of tone that, in context, hinted at a link, however, strained, with Walton. It is always fun – well, nearly always – to hear the cimbalom too, and we most certainly did on this occasion, if rather less imaginatively (writing, not performance) than I had earlier this week in Jörg Widmann’s Zweites Labyrinth. The Berlin brass’s performance was truly outstanding in ‘The Battle and Defeat of Napoleon’, and so on. It was an enjoyable performance in itself; quite what its connection with Walton or Mozart might have been remained obscure.

Widmann/Uchida - Brahms, Berg, Widmann, Schubert, and Schumann, 9 February 2017

Wigmore Hall

 

Brahms – Clarinet Sonata no.1 in F minor, op.120 no.1

Berg – Four Pieces for clarinet and piano, op.5

Jörg Widmann – Fantasie, for solo clarinet

Schubert – Impromptu in C minor, D 899/1

Widmann – Sonatina facile (UK premiere)

Schumann – Fantasiestücke, op.73

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

 

A wonderful concert! If I had my doubts about the substance of the new Sonatina facile for piano solo, by Jörg Widmann, it was entertaining enough, and received a bravura performance from Mitsuko Uchida. A tribute to Mozart’s C major Piano Sonata, KV 545, with identical movement markings, ‘Allegro’, ‘Andante’, and ‘Rondo’, it starts off in deconstructive fashion not dissimilar to Schnittke’s (K)ein Sommernachtstraum. Harmonies in the opening ‘Allegro’ at times sound not unlike Henze; I thought of his own Mozart piano tribute, Cherubino. The nineteenth century looms large too, throughout the piece: ‘nineteenth century Mozart’, Beethoven (op.13?), Chopin, et al. As with his Con brio Concert Overture, there is much that teases: is this quotation or allusion? Does it matter? Whatever it is, though, it is certainly not facile in the sense applied to Mozart’s work.

 

Otherwise, there was much to intrigue, to enjoy, even to confound. The starkness of much of Uchida’s piano playing in the first movement of the Brahms F minor Sonata guarded against any conventional notion of autumnal mellowness. (I love that variety of Brahms as much as the next listener, perhaps more, but it is not the only way.) Widmann’s clarinet playing seemed to look even towards Birtwistle, certainly towards Berg and Schoenberg. A sense of exhaustion and the impetus dialectically derived from it brought Mendelssohn to mind at one point, so this was not simply Brahms from a twentieth- or indeed twenty-first century standpoint. Intervals – and then how does one not think of Webern – did a good deal of the work, just as they should. I liked the uneasy, even sometimes effortful lyricism of the second movement. The opening, neo-Mozartian – definitely not Mozartian without the ‘neo’ – grace of the Allegretto grazioso was soon undercut. Darkness was far from confined to the central section. The finale was more volatile than one generally hears, and all the better for it.

 

Berg’s Four Pieces followed naturally – or better, with seeming inevitability. From the very first piece, the similarity not only in motivic working but also in expressivity was apparent: not always, of course, but often. There was certainly nothing Brahmsian about those piano bell chimes, magical and menacing at once. Kinship with Schoenberg’s op.19 (especially the second of those pieces) was especially apparent in Uchida’s performance of the second piece, tendencies intensified in the fourth, whilst Widmann’s – the clarinet’s – scampering wit in the third evoked Pierrot lunaire. That intensification in the fourth and final piece brought homes just what variety there is to be experienced in unity, and vice versa. ‘Cataclysmic’ would not be an exaggerated description of the piano climax as heard here. And then, quite, lyrical witness…

 

Widmann’s solo Fantasie proved quite the tour de force. A multiphonic drone-like opening, out of which Don Juan-like ascending phrases issue forth, lodged itself long in the memory. All manner of extended techniques, and more ‘traditional’ ones – jazzy glissandi, for instance – contributed to a compelling narrative. Contours were traced by Widmann as performer, insofar as one can distinguish the two, with high drama and a sovereign command of musical line.

 

The C minor Impromptu with which the second half opened began, perhaps echoing the Brahms, in stark fashion, yet would ultimately prove far from unyielding. Nevertheless, such was the granite-like implacability of Uchida’s performance, that I thought more of a conductor such as Otto Klemperer than of pianists. For all the grandeur, though, there was great intimacy too: such were revealed to be two sides of the same coin. Schubert sounded contemporary, if anything rather more so than the Widmann of the Sonatina facile.

 

Schumann’s Fantasiestücke opened as if with a reminiscence of an earlier Brahms than the one we had heard here. Melody, harmony, even developmental method evoked kinship. By the same token, there was something fresher here, redolent of a stroll through German Romantic woods. The second piece was fantastical – as the title would suggest! – in the best Schumann tradition. There was nothing ‘late’ here, save perhaps for our perception. Sunny, yet not without shadow, the third exhibited more than a hint of neo-Classicism, suggesting connections with Widmann’s own work. The Andante from Mendelssohn’s early clarinet sonata in E-flat major offered longing without exaggeration; connections with much of what we had heard earlier were inescapable, but were never forced upon us.

 

Uchida - Mozart and Schumann, 31 January 2017

Royal Festival Hall

Mozart – Piano Sonata no.16 in C major, KV 545

Schumann – Kreisleriana, op.16
Schumann – Fanatasie in C major, op.17


Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

In a well-nigh perfect performance of Mozart’s ‘sonata for beginners’ – how treacherous that claim! – Mitsuko Uchida gave the impression and not far, I think, from the reality of utter effacement of the self. This was not anonymity, yet the sense, however illusory, of unmediated access to the work ‘itself’ could rarely have been felt more strongly. Come scritto, certainly; but not just as written, as we know it in the concert hall, or the parlour, of our imagination. The first movement’s passage work was second to none, articulation not only true, but a true joy. (How I wished my schoolboy left hand had permitted me to play a single bar, let alone a single phrase, like that. Not that my right hand had come so much closer…) ‘Just’ scales for so much of the development: not at all? The subdominant surprise in the recapitulation registered with subtle strength, preparing the way for Mozart’s concomitantly surprising path back ‘home’. The second movement offered similar virtues. Its transparency is cruel, even by Mozart’s standards, yet that posed, so it seemed, Uchida no difficulty whatsoever. The music flowed beautifully, its legato ‘like oil’. And how a chromatic note made all the difference in the world: so much from what might have looked so little! The turn to the minor mode evinced no exaggeration, but any degree of honest, even heart-rending drama. Uchida resisted the common impulse to rush the finale, which received a reading full of charm, delight, and yes, again, subtlety. Childlike? Perhaps, but certainly never childish. Mozart’s – Uchida’s too? – second naïveté worked its magic nevertheless.

The rest of the programme was devoted to Schumann. First came Kreisleriana. The opening piece benefited from admirable clarity. Perhaps it might have had a little more of the tempest to it, a little more flexibility too; nevertheless, the clearing of the skies still registered – again magically. I found myself comparing the difference in Mozart’s and Schumann’s use of arpeggios: not as some abstract distraction from the ‘poetry’, but by putting technical means at the heart of that poetry. There was greater flexibility in the second movement and thereafter, its intermezzi contrasting and responding to the opening material in a finely traced musical arc, as etched by Uchida (and Schumann!) Brahmsian compositional technique seemed unusually apparent in many of these movements, yet quite without Brahms’s ‘lateness’. Here was an earlier Romanticism, and rightly so. A little untidiness in the third and seventh was ultimately of little import; if anything, it reminded us that this music is not supposed to be easy to play (not, I hasten to add, that technique should ever be belittled.) The poise and dignity Uchida showed in the fourth, the whimsy that yet spoke of something darker in the fifth, and the ambiguity of the lullaby, intensified by the intrusion of contrasting material, in the sixth: all were movingly, perceptively portrayed. So too was the concluding movement, here sounding very much as in Harriet Smith’s programme note description: ‘less like the end … than the quiet closing of that door, the illicit listener tiptoeing away.’

The C major Fantasie followed the interval. Uchida’s first movement opened magisterially – a word overused, but not, I think, inappropriate here – yet capable of yielding. One always ‘knows’ that this is one of Schumann’s greatest works; here one undoubtedly felt it too, not least through the ongoing sense of perpetual development: ‘developing variation’, as any Schoenbergian would tell you. Here, comparisons with Liszt’s B minor Sonata seemed fully apposite. So did Schumann’s marking: ‘Durchaus phantastisch und leidenschaftlich vorzutragen’. Originality and eloquence were to be heard equally in all three movements: work and performance. The second had a fine, almost Elgarian swagger to its opening. It was questioned thereafter, again not unlike Elgar, although it was Chopin who came to mind in the serenity with which ensuing contrast was sung, likewise in the flickering, even dissolving, tendencies of Uchida’s left hand. Out of that extraordinary march emerged mystery and clarity in equal measure, in contest and collaboration. The quiet dignity with which the musical narrative was constructed, or perhaps better, constructed itself, brought an intriguing combination of methods with roots in both Chopin and late Beethoven. As for the Innigkeit heard and felt: that was entirely Schumann’s own. So were the paths down which the musical journey led us and its conclusion: they could hardly have been envisaged, let alone navigated, by anyone else. Uchida reminded us keenly of that ineffable individuality.

In a similarly exquisite fusion of process and poetry, she did that too in an encore of breathtaking delicacy and unerring direction. I guessed (correctly) that it had been by Kurtág. Only this morning did I find out which piece: Play with Infinity. Quite.

MCO/Uchida - Mozart and Bartók, 29 November 2016

Royal Festival Hall

Mozart – Piano Concerto no.17 in G major, KV 453

Bartók – Divertimento
Mozart – Piano Concerto no.25 in C major, KV 503

Mitsuko Uchida (piano/director)
Mahler Chamber Orchestra

‘Yes, of course I’m here,’ I tweeted a few minutes before the concert, with a picture of the programme and performers. Two Mozart piano concertos from Mitsuko Uchida and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, with the Bartók Divertimento in between: give or take a piece by Schoenberg, I could hardly have asked for more. Perhaps, then, my expectations were unrealistic, for I found myself a little disappointed by the performance of the G major Piano Concerto, especially its first movement. I was impressed that Uchida had rethought, sometimes quite radically, the approach I recall from her celebrated recording with Jeffrey Tate and the English Chamber Orchestra. However, I was not entirely convinced. It was partly a matter of coming to terms with the Festival Hall acoustic, I think, in so intimate a performance, but it was not only that. Nevertheless, intrigued and slightly nonplussed is surely better than bored by the ‘same old’.

 

The orchestra opened crisply, stylishly, but sounded a little undernourished in the opening tutti. Uchida was, I think, faster, certainly more impish, than in her ECO recording. There is nothing wrong with that, but her non legato passages struck me as odd: I could not work out why they were being played as they were, although she certainly had me listen – and puzzle. Phrasing remained beyond reproach, though, and the chamber quality to the performance as a whole had its advantages. Indeed, the concerto sounded very much the companion piece to the Piano Quintet, KV 452, with which, if I remember correctly, was the coupling for that concerto recording. Only occasionally was a fuller orchestral sound unleashed, but Uchida was – interestingly – considerably more muscular in her approach to the recapitulation. The cadenza offered an amalgam of the different tendencies we had heard, for better and for worse. I liked the lessening of string vibrato at the opening of the slow movement, as if launching an operatic accompagnato – which, in a sense, it is. Various wind soloists and ultimately the piano soloist responded with greater warmth; however, I was nevertheless quite taken aback – positively – by the frankly Romantic minor-mode playing, whether overtly passionate, or more innig. This and the finale were, for me, far more involving. They both seemed to benefit also from a more settled, more juste, tempo. (Both are often taken too fast.) The finale’s particular character, Papageno chafing at the bit, was conveyed with that crucial sense of effortlessness. Classical variation form, too often the butt of ill-considered denigration, was vindicated in the best way possible. Piano and flute sforzandi seemed to hint at Beethoven; again, I do not remember hearing the passages in question played like that before.

 

Uchida withdrew for the Bartók, played standing (save for the cellos), directed from the leader’s desk by Matthew Truscott – and very well too. The first movement announced a variegated, energetic (in the best sense) approach, yielding nicely at times, in almost Viennese style. There was again a happy sense of chamber scale, without in this case ever sounding remotely underpowered. The slow movement opened inwardly, mysteriously, not quite glacial, but not quite the contrary either. Its contours were well traced, with a keen sense of drama on offer throughout. There were many gradations of relative thawing and outright contrast to be enjoyed. Idiomatic, never clichéd, the ‘Hungarian’ qualities to the performance of the finale sang out, yet never dominated unduly. The relationship between solo and ripieno playing was very much at the heart of the MCO’s music-making. Bachian contrapuntal lessons had been well learned, so as to emerge as agents of liberation – just as they always should be. There was menace too, and more than a hint of bitter irony.

 

Amongst smaller-scale recordings of what I have long thought of as Mozart’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto, I have long admired that from Alfred Brendel, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, and the late Neville Marriner. Again, I was taken by surprise quite how different Uchida’s performance here was: more rhetorical, although always directed towards its tonal goal. Trumpets and drums seemed to have emboldened the MCO strings too. Oscillation between tonic major and minor was rightly at the heart of the performance; Charles Rosen would surely have approved. The measured tempo was well chosen, providing plenty of space for the musical argument to unfold, and to be dramatised. There was not perhaps quite the dramatic conception of a Daniel Barenboim here, but there is more than one way to play a Mozart concerto; Uchida’s ‘incidental’ flights of fancy were not to be slighted, and here seemed better integrated. The cadenza offered hints of Beethoven, all to the good in this ‘imperial’ work. Uchida’s slow movement offered ‘chamber’ contrast. Mozart was cherished, heartrendingly so, but never suffocated, in this garden of late, yet not too late, delights. An unexaggerated dialectic between fragility and ebullience characterised the finale. What could be more Mozartian? Uchida again proved perhaps surprisingly mercurial, rhetorical too. Whatever my doubts about the first concerto, this was a delight to the last.

 

Uchida/Quatuor Ebène - Haydn, Ravel, and Schumann, 6 December 2015

Wigmore Hall

Haydn – String Quartet in C major, op.20 no.2

Ravel – String Quartet in F major
Schumann – Piano Quintet in E-flat major, op.44

Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

Pierre Colombet, Gabriel Le Magadure (violins)

Adrien Boisseau (viola)

Raphaël Merlin (cello)

  

The Vienna Konzerthaus might, for a month, have become my new favoured hall – strictly, a house of more than one hall – but returning to the Wigmore Hall reminded me, just in case I needed reminding, that the Wigmore Hall not only stands as first among equals for chamber music; it is, simply, the best in the world. This programme from the Quatuor Ebène and Mitsuko Uchida would have offered a great attraction anywhere and certainly did in musically overflowing London, soon selling out; the resulting concert proved equally impressive.

 

This was certainly one of the best performances of a Haydn quartet I have heard, constantly taking one by surprise – in the best way. The intriguing opening sonority – for which responsibility should be shared between composer and players: high cello singing above second violin and viola – sounded redolent of the old sonata di chiesa or still more venerable music for viol consort, but with the most modern of means, in itself a lesson for apostles of ‘authenticity’. This was never, thank God, a vibrato-free, or even vibrato-lite, zone. Out of such an opening, there blossomed full Classical tone and style. Counterpoint, of course, remained Janus-faced, generatively so. The rest of this extraordinary movement was both furious and complex, in work and performance. One needed to listen, and was finely rewarded when one did. The opening unison of the second movement ‘spoke’ almost like a recitativo acommpagnato, looking back to the late Baroque and sideways perhaps, even if coincidentally so, to Gluck, yet also looking forward, even pre-empting Beethoven. I thought of the slow movement to the Fourth Piano Concerto, Orpheus famously taming the furies. Transition to a more lyrical plane sounded somehow both fragile and secure – something, perhaps, to do with the relationship between melody and harmony – and again seemed to beckon toward the Romantic conception, right or wrong, of Beethoven having burst formal bonds. The fury of subsequent unison outbursts intensified such dialectical tension, preparing the way for different yet related dialectical ambiguities in the minuet (connected, of course, to its predecessor). Haydn, rightly, emerged as every bit as ‘difficult’ a composer as Brahms, Schoenberg, or, yes, Beethoven. The great tension built up, as great as anything in Beethoven, was worked out with a triumphant finale worthy of Haydn’s sometimes unhappy pupil. Yet there was also the intellectual nonchalance akin to late Mozart. The audacity of work and performance truly took my breath away. Magnificent!

Ravel received a performance, which, if less surprising, was no less excellent. The players offered a more conventionally polished sound from the outset; one could hardly have – or wish to have – ‘unpolished’ Ravel. There was sheen aplenty for fury and placidity alike, as the composer surely demands. (Presumably somebody somewhere is claiming that any Ravel performance daring to show a little vibrato, a little beauty of tone, is an outright abomination, but who cares?) Subtle rubato emerged from the material rather than being imposed upon it. The scherzo thrilled, sparks duly, precisely, lovingly flying. Tenderness, though, lay at its heart. There was an almost Webern-like mystery to the slow movement, an inscrutability to the opening material and its development: seemingly unpredictable, even when one ‘knew’ it. This was not easy Ravel; nor should it have been. There was great sweetness but we also experienced great reticence and an almost Debussyan ambiguity: through, not in spite of, compositional and performative precision. The finale opened, seemingly hurtling towards the vortex, à ‘La Valse’¸taking with it material it recalled from before, but with progress as mysterious as that in the preceding movement. The Quatuor Ebène offered playing of a febrile intensity such as to attain true climax.

Uchida added her famously pellucid piano tone and unforced, unshowy musicality to the ensemble for Schumann’s Piano Quintet. I really cannot understand why we do not hear this wonderful work more often; maybe ‘we’ do, and I have just been unfortunate in missing out on performances. The opening of the first movement was forthright yet melting, solo – by which, I do not just mean the piano – and ensemble playing equally tender. Schumann’s myriad of instrumental combinations were rendered wonderfully alive. Closeness to Brahms was both maintained and guarded against; this sounded ‘like’ no one other than Schumann, whatever connections presented themselves. Indeed, at some points, both here and in the second movement, it was Schubert and the Lied tradition that came to my mind, composer and performance seemingly constructing and deconstructing song before our ears. All, in a sense, were both songbirds and their grim hunters. Uchida maintained the harmonic basis for all that happened, as if playing for an instrumental Frauenliebe und -leben. The scherzo, by contrast, showed a strength of purpose which it was more or less impossible not to think of as Beethovenian, underlying even the relative relaxation of the first trio. Concision, both in work and performance, were certainly worthy of Beethoven, and it was difficult to avoid the sense of Schumann touching Brahms’s shoulder in the second trio. The exhilaration was such that we might almost already have heard our finale. That, of course, required something different, and received it, in what must surely be one of Schumann’s most creative responses to the ‘finale problem’. The music emerged in all its variegated glory and, at least as important, with all its emotional weight. Bachian lessons were learned – and returned with interest.

 

Kožená/Uchida - Schumann, Wolf, Dvořák, and Schoenberg, 5 October 2015

Wigmore Hall

Schumann – Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart

Wolf – Selection from Mörike-Lieder: ‘Begegnung’, ‘Neue Liebe’, ‘Nimmersatte Liebe’, ‘Das verlassene Mägdlein’, ‘Elfenlied’, ‘Verborgenheit’, ‘Wo find ich Trost?’, Auf ein altes Bild’, ‘Lebe wohl’, ‘Nixe Binsefuß’, ‘Abschied’
Dvořák – Love Songs, op.83
Schoenberg – Brettl-Lieder

Magdalena Kožená (mezzo-soprano)

Dame Mitsuko Uchida (piano)

 

Magdalena Kožená seems to be an increasingly controversial artist. I did not hear the Proms Dream of Gerontius, conducted by her husband, Simon Rattle, but much comment focused upon her assumption of the role of the Angel. Some of what was said then seemed relevant to this recital, especially its first half. I was less troubled by the overt emotionalism of her singing; such matters are to a considerable degree a matter of taste. However, there was an unvariegated stridency to much, although not all, of this first half that I found it difficult to warm to, especially when contrasted with the unerring rightness of Mitsuko Uchida’s piano-playing.

 

Schumann’s late Geidchte der Königin Maria Stuart are unquestionably a case of ‘less is more’. Not, alas, so here, at least vocally, ‘Abschied von der Welt’ sounding more like a refugee from the opera house, although the declamatory approach to ‘Nach der Geburt ihres Sohnes’ had worked better. Uchida’s way with Schumann’s piano writing, however, was in quite a different class, as careful, as meaningful, as connected, as if she had been playing his solo music. Indeed, connections with earlier music – the C major Arabeske, for instance, or indeed, Bach’s 48 – announced themselves straight away. In the final ‘Gebet’, it was the piano harmony that told, encasing – not unlike Robin Holloway’s Reliquary for the same songs – the Queen’s plea to the Almighty, preparing the way for that dreadful, sombre close.

 

The selection from Wolf’s Mörike-Lieder opened in urgent contrast, at least so far as the piano was concerned, with ‘Begegnung’. To begin with, that was less in evident vocally, but Kožená captured its later cheekiness well. Planning of the sequence impressed too, with a weightier, more metaphysical note struck in the following ‘Neue Liebe,’ ‘Nimmersatte Liebe’ bringing together qualities from both of its predecessors. Moreover, the opening harmonies of the latter song seemed to prefigure some of those to be heard in Schoenberg’s Brettl-Lieder. Uchida’s piano chimes in ‘Elfenlied’ had one gasp for their melting tone as piano music at least as much as for their pictorial quality, whilst the combination of exquisite sadness and true strength in ‘Wo find ich Trost?’ seemed just right. Kožená by contrast, seemed too ‘public’, at times downright shrill. Musical continuity was once again very much the province of the piano part in the final ‘Abschied’, whose harmonies not for the first time brought Wagner as well as Schoenberg to mind.

 

Dvořák’s Love Songs and their simpler style seemed far better suited to Kožená. With respect to language, I can say little more than that it sounded right. Doubtless those with Czech would be able to say much more concerning what she did with the words, but my impression was a good deal, without it being too much. There was certainly a far more variegated vocal line in, for instance, ‘V tak mnohém srdci mrtvo jest’ (‘Death dwells in so many a heart’), its final line in particular. Uchida’s pellucid tone for the arpeggios and their variants in the closing ‘Ó, duše drahá, jedinká’ (‘O dear matchless soul’) would have justified attendance in itself.

 

Shorn of my favourite ‘Nachtwandler’, which requires additional piccolo, trumpet, and snare drum’, Schoenberg’s Brettl-Lieder nevertheless packed quite a punch. Again, Kožená seemed quite in her element, words, music, words-and-music full of incident, of fun, of ‘life’; Uchida put all of her Schoenbergian experience, lightly worn, to splendid effect. (I cannot for a moment concur with Misha Donat’s claim in his programme note that these songs ‘would be of no more than marginal interest were it not for the fact that out of them grew … Pierrot lunaire.’) The knowing heaviness in ‘Einfältiges Lied’ showed a true meeting of performers’ minds (and the composer’s too). ‘Mahnung’ tilted more towards outright cabaret, Kožená’s voice often coloured by tuning, and not afraid either to shun conventional ‘beauty’ or to speak rather than sing. That tendency was taken still further in the final Schikander aria, a highly ‘masculine’ rendition of certain stanzas and lines not the least of Kožená’s surprises. Janáček’s ‘Lavečka’ was the deceptively simple, profoundly moving encore.