Hewitt - Mozart, 3 December 2022

St John’s Waterloo

Fantasia in C minor, KV 396/385f
Sonata in C major, KV 330/300h
Fantasia in D minor, KV 397/385g
Sonata in A major, KV 331/300i

Angela Hewitt (piano)

 

Image: Matthew Johnson

Angela Hewitt returned to Spotlight Chamber Concerts and St John’s Waterloo with a beautifully prepared and performed all-Mozart recital (to coincide with her new series for Hyperion). A fantasia was followed by a sonata twice over—but not necessarily the fantasia or sonata one might have expected. 

The C minor Fantasia, KV 396/385f, has been rather overshadowed by Mozart’s later fantasia in the same key. There are good reasons for this, among them the earlier work’s unfinished status, though we shall probably never know quite how much Maximilian Stadler’s completion owes to Mozart, and the fact that it was conceived as a movement for violin and piano. It works very well as we heard it here, though—and certainly did under Hewitt’s fingers. Her opening (and Mozart’s) offered a fine sense of ‘preluding’ extemporisation, even tending a little towards the Gothic-to-come (which naturally had roots in what had already come). This was music ‘in search of…’ and eventually it found what it needed, coalescing strongly around the relative major, E-flat, at the close of the exposition. The Sturm und Drang of the development might have come from one of the piano concertos. Above all, this was a rich, spacious performance that was yet full of life. 

The C major Sonata, KV 330/300h, received a detailed, lively performance. The opening of the first movement, and much else in it, can readily sound fussy, but not here. Hewitt’s shading of dynamics and articulation trod that tightrope with security and conviction. There were a few times when I wondered whether greater dynamic contrast might have been in order, not least in the development, but that is more a matter of taste than anything else. Taking the second repeat emphasised the seriousness of Hewitt’s approach; it is difficult to imagine anyone wanting to have done without in context. The Andante cantabile was beautifully sung, at a well-chosen tempo. It went deeper than its predecessor, which is probably right. Hewitt voiced a properly Mozartian sadness for the central F minor episode. I occasionally missed the greater flexibility some pianists might have brought here, but that was not her way, which had an undeniable integrity of its own. That relative straightforwardness certainly paid off one more in the finale: again, not a hint of fussiness, though there is much going on. Hewitt traced a judicious path of detail without pedantry. She also conveyed suggestively and engagingly Mozart’s implied contrasts of solo and tutti.

The D minor Fantasia benefited from a dark, rich opening, Hewitt’s performance imbued with great dramatic immediacy here and throughout. The pianist used silences and phrase endings with great intelligence, just as much as the notes ‘themselves’. The short D major concluding section (almost certainly Stadler) gave the strong impression of originating in what had gone before. 

To follow it with the A major Sonata, KV 331/300i, was a surprise well conceived and executed. Its first movement, the well-known theme and variations, also proved finely detailed: full of variation even before the variations themselves. Once more, Hewitt used the piano to suggest an orchestra beyond it, whilst remaining true to her (and Mozart’s) instrument. This was definitely Mozart, not Mozart-straining-to-be-Reger. Each variation possessed its own character, yet formed part of an intelligently planned greater sequence. One felt (as well as saw and heard) the sheer delight of crossing hands. Hewitt, moreover, offered some light, stylish ornamentation of her own. The second movement emerged in similar spirit: a minuet for piano, not a minuet that happened to be played on piano. Likewise its mellow, euphonious trio, at times but a stone’s throw from Schubert, yet at others distant indeed: always in Mozart’s spirit. The Turkish Rondo seemed in turn to respond to what had preceded it, which is far from always the case. Its ‘Janissary’ style was relished, but as means to a musical, rondo-finale end rather than an end in itself. It was charming, fun, and at times not a little whimsical. 

As an encore, we were treated to the slow movement of the A minor Sonata, KV 310/300d. A direct yet similarly detailed performance included a markedly turbulent central section. Always, the music flowed.

Friend/Daraskaite/Sokolovskis, Cheung - Messiaen, 20 November 2022

St John’s Waterloo

Quatuor pour la fin du temps

Anthony Friend (clarinet)

Agata Daraskaite (violin)

Peteris Sokolovskis (cello)

James Cheung (piano)

Photograph: Matthew Johnson

What a joy to return to a new series of Spotlight Chamber Concerts, itself returning to St John’s Waterloo following refurbishment (and looking like new). Here a single work was on the programme, Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, sounding ever more a classic of the chamber repertoire with every fine performance, of which this was certainly one. A quartet of young musicians, clarinettist Anthony Friend (also presiding impresario of the series as a whole), violinist Agata Daraskaite, cellist Peteris Sokolvskis, and pianist James Cheung offered an eminently musicianly view of Messiaen’s work that, rightly, felt no need to dwell one-sidedly on circumstances of composition, leaving space for all to find their own standpoint. Hope, joy, and the mystery of God can take many forms—and frankly, right now, we should be well advised to take what we can.  

The opening ‘Liturgie de cristal’, all four instruments rendering metre and harmony immanenthypnotised, entranced, had one believe. Infinitely flexible within an iron framework, it set the scene wonderfully for what was to follow, whether in affinity or contrast. The coming of the angel who announces the end of time in the following ‘Vocalise’ certainly offered immediate, declamatorily apocalyptic contrast, itself followed by the many faces or melodies of that angel in well-nigh hallucinatory fashion. Their sweetness was both unreal and hyper-real: not unlike the colours of a world created anew after a storm. 

The solo clarinet ‘Abîme des oiseaux’, in similar paradox, seemed to stretch time so as both to have all that in our world and, yet, in that of the piece only just enough (fitting, given the end of time itself announced). In Friend’s performance, it emerged, intriguingly, as an heir to the cor anglaise solo, beyond good and evil, in the third act of Tristan und Isolde, a work whose enraptured victims certainly included Messiaen. A shepherd song, yet sweeter, perhaps even stranger, still more mysterious, it was expertly shaped in performance so as not to sound shaped at all. It was spellbinding, but then so was much else, for instance the twin relief and intensification of the ensuing brief ‘Intermède’. Only after did one have pause to think how tricky it is to write for clarinet, violin, cello, and no piano.

Cheung’s piano returned, of course, for the celebrated ‘Louange à l’Éternité de Jésus’ with cello. Unhurried, never dragging, it always moved, seemingly founded on a sense of harmonic rhythm from which all else grew. It was as intense as it was big-hearted, Sokolovskis’s vibrato generous, yet never excessive. The strange unisons of ‘Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes’ glistened, gleamed, glowed, and occasionally glowered. 

Such warm precision was felt again, like the rainbows of which the movement told, in ‘Fouillis d’arcs en-ciel, pour l’Ange qui annonce la fin du temps’. There was darkness too, yet always colourful darkness, the angel’s swords of fire palpably present without need to underline. The final ‘Louange à l’Immortalité de Jésus’ sounded very much a kindred spirit to the earlier ‘Louange’, only this time with violin and piano. Daraskaite’s rich-toned, equally generous playing contributed movingly towards a consolation that came close to passing all understanding.

Waterloo Festival (4) - Schubert and Mozart, 23 June 2021

St John’s, Waterloo

Schubert: String Trio in B-flat major, D 471
Mozart: Divertimento in E-flat major, KV 563

Anthony Marwood (violin)

Hélène Clément (viola)

Tim Posner (cello)

 

Images: Matthew Johnson

Following a day from hell at work and consequent mad dash to the station to reach St John’s Waterloo in time, this programme of two string trios, one a fragment and one a towering masterpiece not only of the trio but also of the whole chamber repertoire, proved just the ticket. Schubert’s torso, here given only with its first movement, the only one completed, worked well as a generous curtain raiser. Here, Anthony Marwood, Hélène Posner and Tim Posner caught its mood beautifully from the outset: graceful, variegated, and post-Mozartian—just, though in that ‘just’, like the ‘and’ of Tristan and Isolde, lies everything. The fascination of string trio texture, whether for players, listeners, or composer was palpable. Fresh, musical playing, as alert to moment as to line, had one delight—however much one ‘knew’—in the smallest of surprises. A questing development that never strained, briefly imbued with the rarest of sadness, gave way naturally, inevitably—however much craft may lie in that appearance—to the moment of return. Taking the second repeat added in the best way to yet another of Schubert’s celebrated ‘heavenly lengths’. The close, rightly, tantalised; the rest was silence—or rather applause, and then Mozart.


Mozart’s E-flat Divertimento—did ever a genre title seem so insufficient?—received an equally splendid performance. It unfolds with such miraculous ease and depth, that its more overtly contrapuntal nature beguiles as if somewhere between one of Bach’s Trio Sonatas and an endless—well, almost—trio from one of Mozart’s operas. At least, so it did here, the instruments as much as their players characters in a conversational drama to rival Strauss’s Capriccio. There may well be metatheatricality, but it is worn more lightly than Strauss’s: as much a consequence of historical position as anything else, yet nonetheless striking from our vantage point. Switching of roles between instruments brought a smile to my face every time in the opening Allegro and beyond. That first movement’s development seemed effortlessly to emphasise—always the contradictory thing with Mozart—the colour of keys and modulations, harmonic motion the driving force of this wordless drama. No equal temperament here. The trajectory to recapitulation climax and subsidence was just as well judged.


If anything, the emotional range of the Adagio proved wider still; that probably lies in its essence. It opened more chastely, turning soon more passionate. How beautifully, meaningfully different every string of each instrument sounded, expanding the cast of our divine comedy. No one understood such capabilities and the infinite uses to which they could be put better than Mozart. The recapitulation had all the richness of a second development, albeit with none of the struggle one would have found in Beethoven. Yet what radicalism we heard in the harmony, so long as we listened as invited. In the next movement, Mozart’s jesting with cross-rhythm seduced and perplexed, even as it satisfied. As happy as it was melancholy, it paved the way, if only in retrospect, for a disconcertingly ghostly theme to the following movement, that theme’s first variation necessary balm yet no less clever. Once again, there was no denying either theatricality or progress to something beyond the stage, something a more confident age would have called ‘absolute music’. The final variation burst forth like a cross between Bach family Quodlibet and symphonic finale—which, after all, is more or less what it is, or can be.

 

The second minuet offered due balance and contrast to its predecessor. With all the ingenuity and still more of the fun of one of Mozart’s contemporaneous orchestral dances, it permitted trios both to relax and to intensify, as is their performing destiny. What invention lies here in the text; invention lay in its characterisation too. The finale’s knife-edge mixture of (mock?) innocence and puppyish exuberance proved both contrast and complement, two sides to one of Mozart’s most extraordinary coins. Mercurial magic led us through a garden of delights to a miracle of invertible counterpoint to match the Jupiter’s, albeit cunningly not as climax. Mozart surprises with the expected and the unexpected.

Waterloo Festival (3) – Doric String Quartet: Schubert, Bartók, and Mozart, 8 June 2021

St John's, Waterloo

Schubert: Quartettsatz, D 703
Bartók: String Quartet no.3, Sz. 85
Mozart: String Quartet no.23 in F major, KV 590

Alex Redington, Ying Xue (violins)

Hélène Clément (viola)

John Myerscough (cello)

Images: Matthew Johnson

With such a programme, one might have been back at the Wigmore Hall. Indeed, many are already. It is a hallmark of Anthony Friend’s achievement in his Spotlight Chamber Concerts that all combinations of artists and programme I have heard might readily have taken place in London’s—many would say the world’s—finest chamber music venue. This evening was the turn of the Doric String Quartet, in Schubert, Bartók, and Mozart.


Schubert’s Quartettsatz is a popular recital-opener the world over. However many times one has heard it, it seems always to retain its allure and fascination. This was an unusual performance, unlike any I can recall, a frozen opening thawing somewhat, yet never to the extent of sounding what we might call ‘traditional’, let alone ‘Viennese’. If the tonal palette were somewhat restricted, there were great contrasts nonetheless to be heard within its selected constraints. There was much pent-up fury, so it seemed: a performance, perhaps, for our times. If I cannot imagine always wanting to hear Schubert like this, it was certainly preferable to lazy Gemütlichkeit.


Was that relative astringency in some sense preparation for Bartók? Not really, for it was quite rightly a very different world we entered with his Third Quartet: a different kind of ice, a different kind of febrility. Process stood more closely to the fore: doubtless a reflection of the work itself, but also of the performance. The palette here was broader, both in tone and dynamic contrasts. The players showed a keen collective—and individual—ear for detail and its place in the greater whole. If sometimes one felt on the brink of chaos, there was no doubt this was an organised chaos, drama lying in the shards of light, the cracks between notes, as much as in Bartók’s well-nigh Mozartian profusion of melody and, crucially, its relationship to harmony. Syncopation and other rhythmic devices propelled that drama, but never alone.

 

I often missed that relationship between melody and harmony and the consequent harmonic motion that creates dynamic form in the performance of Mozart’s late F major Quartet, KV 590. Clearly the Doric players hear Mozart differently from me, their favoured light, silvery, broadly ‘period’ tone—post-Harnoncourt, one might call it—very different from my ideal (or default). That, however, is no bad thing; one should always be prepared to examine and re-examine one’s preconceptions and prejudices. Their approach is in any case far from dogmatic: there was strikingly warmer playing from all concerned too. It was more what I heard sometimes as a strange lack of direction that puzzled. That said, there was much to admire in each movement: the first a model of conversational playing; the second swift yet intriguingly chaste, enigmatic, even introverted. The third offered splendid emotional intensification in its trio, whilst the fourth was full of incident in its almost helter-skelter progress. I never heard it smile, though. The lack, moreover, of an identifiable—to me—pulse had the music sound increasingly listless. For me, this was quixotic Mozart, but it drew me in to listen, above all in the intensity of passages taken sotto voce. It also had me think.

Waterloo Festival (2) - Solem Quartet and friends: Schubert, 4 June 2021

St John’s Waterloo

Schubert: Octet in F major, D 803

Amy Tress, William Newell (violins)

Stephan Upshaw (viola)

Stephanie Tress (cello)

Anthony Friend (clarinet)

Catriona McDermid (bassoon)

Stephen Craigen (horn)

Marianne Schofield (double bass)

Images: Matthew Johnson

Back to St John’s, Waterloo, for the next in Spotlight Chamber Concerts’ contribution to the Waterloo Festival. It was clear that the Solem Quartet and friends enjoyed their performance of Schubert’s Octet. So, surely, would all in the audience have done; this audience member certainly did. As we begin to rebuild our lives in line with this year’s Festival’s guiding word, ‘respair’, that return of hope after seemingly endless despair, far from yet banished, civilisation and enjoyment are not the least of the resources on which we shall continue to call. They were found in abundance here at nine o’clock on a Friday night, as outside the sun and inside the spotlight began to fall.


Pregnant with expectation—a feeling common to us all right now—the first movement introduction, redolent of works by Schubert’s Viennese Classical predecessors yet unmistakeably his own, presaged the mood to come: of a world that might still long for the serenades of Mozart, yet which ultimately knows that time is past. The main Allegro was beautifully, meaningfully flexible, shifts in tempo contributing to the greater whole. There was a keen sense in work and performance alike of roots in tradition, without so much as a hint of the merely reactionary. The development’s turn to F-sharp minor proved rightly both surprising and the most natural thing in the world, heard and felt with a pathos given space to blossom—and which therefore did. There was a fine impression of tonal ascent to the moment of return. During that recapitulation, I especially loved the transfer of melodic line between Catriona McDermid’s bassoon and Stephen Upshaw’s viola.

 

The Adagio flowed like a river on a summer’s day: subtly yet undeniably. The more closely one listened, the more there was to listen to. Expressive, non-dogmatic variation of strong vibrato guided our path, enhancing the impression of a string quartet joined and enhanced by friends. Stephen Craigen’s horn and Anthony Friend’s clarinet likewise did much to guide an unerring tonal plan, realised in full when Schubert’s owl of Minerva began at movement-dusk to spread its wings. A scherzo as fresh as it was bright nonetheless seemed predicated on the memory of something darker. The trio relaxed on the one hand, intensifying on the other, its counterpoint both blithe and serious, the scherzo’s reprise heard in the light of what had changed.


The fourth movement sang with a naïve charm that yet knew its place was too late, thus turning, heartrendingly, to variation. Each variation was finely characterised yet found its place within the greater scheme. If it would be invidious to single any one out, it was perhaps inevitably the turn to the minor mode that touched most deeply. There was a subtle melancholy—at least I fancied so—to the Minuet, which again suggested already the neoclassicism of a time that knew its distance from Mozart. Allied to that, even necessitated by it, was a sense of corners still to be turned, of new vistas still to be seen and heard.


Darkly Romantic tension in the introduction was shown to be but one side of the finale’s coin, the sheer good nature of its harmony and counterpoint the other, in a finely judged performance that both refused to be hurried, let alone harried, and yet with seeming effortlessness maintained its forward impetus. It took us through contrast and conflict to something more equitable and, yes, civilised: something greatly needed in our present condition.

Waterloo Festival (1): Hewitt - Couperin and Brahms, 27 May 2021

St John’s, Waterloo

Couperin: Pièces de clavecin, Book III: 18e Ordre
Brahms: Piano Sonata no.3 in F minor, op.5

Angela Hewitt (piano)  

Images: Ilme Vysniauskaite

Taking as its theme the fifteenth-century English word, ‘respair’, the recovery of hope following a period of despair, the 2021 Waterloo Festival offers much of that desperately sought-after quality, not least the return of Anthony Friend’s Spotlight Chamber Concerts series, so cruelly cut short last December. Twice postponed, a recital by Angela Hewitt, originally conceived as a farewell to Beethoven Year (‘Geh, Hoffnung’) now offered music by Couperin and Brahms to a socially distanced audience of about 150 people. That in itself surely offered grounds for respair.


To the uninitiated, Couperin and Brahms might seem a strange combination. Brahms was of course a crucial figure in nineteenth-century revival of early music. He knew Bach’s cantatas intimately; it would be difficult to overstate the importance of Bach’s music for his own. Handel loomed large too: Brahms provided written out continuo parts (on piano) for an entire volume of Handel’s Italian duets and trios, gave the Vienna premiere of Saul in 1873, and the German Requiem speaks for itself. Brahms’s work with older German masters such as Isaac, Schütz, and Buxtehude likewise informed both concert life and his own writing. Brahms’s political nationalism—whatever some may tell you, far less tenuous than Wagner’s—notwithstanding, his musical inclinations were more generous. Advocacy for the keyboard music of Couperin, both as pianist and as ‘editor’ (it seems Friedrich Chrysander did much of the hard work in Brahms’s name), was, if more surprising, no less genuine. Clara Schumann declared herself baffled by Brahms’s interest in something that was ‘really of little interest musically’, yet Elaine Kelly makes a persuasive case for influence on some of Brahms’s later piano music. The Third Piano Sonata does not, of course, fall into that category. And whilst it would doubtless be fascinating to hear an attempted recreation, or at least reimagination, of Brahms’s performing style for Couperin, this was not attempted here. Nor, however, was this one of those perverse attempts to have the piano sound like the harpsichord. (Clue: it never will. If you want the harpsichord, play or listen to the harpsichord.)


Here we heard the 1722 eighteenth ordre, finally balanced between F major and minor—and thus preparing the way for the tonality of Brahms’s sonata. The opening allemande, ‘La Verneüil’ spoke with an occluded freedom very much of our moment. In Hewitt’s hands, it rightly took its time, but it (or rather she) knew where it was heading: respair, one might say. ‘La Verneüilléte’, presumably presenting the daughter of the previously evoked Duke of Bourbon, offered a more wilful obstinacy—make of that what you will—born of, yet extending beyond, its courtly idiom. In the rich melancholy of ‘Sœur Monique’, the acoustic vibration of Couperin’s ornaments in Francis Bedford’s church, proved part and parcel of its magic. Indeed as so often, ‘ornaments’ seemed quite the wrong word. ‘Le turbulent’, bright and busy, and the necessary contrast of ‘L’atendrissante’, all the more lugubrious on the piano, led to a delightful, dexterous musical box of a performance for the celebrated ‘Le tic-toc-choc’. There was finally an almost childlike delight to be had in the boisterous obstinacy, allied to that of ‘La Verneüilléte’, yet unquestionably different in character, in ‘Le gaillard-boiteux’.


Hand on heart, I am yet to be won over by any of Brahms’s three piano sonatas, all of them early works. Never say never, though, and it is quite possible that this performance will have edged me a little closer. There was no denying the captivating quality to the first movement’s contrast: tumultuous opening, soon scaled down to prophetic half-lights—far from solely the province of the composer’s late years—in a dialectic of tragic virtuosity. Hewitt captured well the Classicism with which the young composer already distinguished himself from Schumann: more than mere framing, though certainly that too. The ‘Andante espressivo’, to my ears more ingratiating, was sung without sentimentality and with clear direction, reflexively exulting in its material possibilities. If the Scherzo is giant, it is not elephantine; it sounded as serious, yet not so grim, as Chopin’s scherzi, in a reading plentiful in chiaroscuro. We heard more of the notes than there is any reasonable ground to expect. The pathos of a young Romantic already somewhat out of his time was readily, winningly apparent in the Intermezzo. The finale showed debts to Beethoven and Schumann if not settled then at least recognised and addressed.

For like so much else right now, they offer but a starting point, the future more uncertain than ever. In that spirit, Hewitt’s encore reignited our immanent sense of respair. Mary Howe’s transcription of Bach’s ‘Sheep may safely graze’ proved, perhaps inevitably, the most immediately moving music of all. Possessed both of dignity and of a freedom that comes of abiding acquaintance, it felt like meeting an old friend in fine new clothes. Where Bach remains, all is not lost.

Friend/Maxwell Quartet - Haydn, Scottish folk music, and Mozart, 13 December 2020

St John’s, Waterloo

Image: Matthew Johnson Photographer

Haydn: String Quartet in C major, op.74 no.1
Scottish folk music
Mozart: Clarinet Quintet in A major, KV 581

Anthony Friend (clarinet)

Colin Scobie, George Smith (violins)

Elliot Perks (viola)

Duncan Strachan (cello)

A highlight of my (late) summer was a visit to the Bandstand Chamber Festival in Battersea Park. For the dark nights, in every sense, of December, artistic director Anthony Friend has had the festival decamp a little further down the Thames to St John’s, Waterloo under the new guise of ‘Spotlight Chamber Concerts’. Very apt, too, the church in darkness, musicians spotlit in front of the altar steps.


The Maxwell Quartet’s concert (later joined by Friend on the clarinet) opened in arresting fashion, thanks to Haydn’s grand gesture—a simple perfect cadence, and yet…—to open his op.74 no.1. It is very much a ‘London’ quartet, written for the same public as those astonishing final dozen symphonies, and there seemed in these darkest of times something special indeed to hearing it in a city that has suffered so greatly not only this year but ever since Cameron’s infernal referendum. Keenness of playing encompassed civilisation and rusticity, detail and longer line, Haydn’s vision of humanity thus diverse and reconciled: a European union. I was struck by the concision of the whole, nowhere more so than in a development that, in performance as on the page, changes everything and yet has us return. The surprises, well-nigh Beethovenian, of the recapitulation, if we may call it that, afforded both delight and imperative to listen.


Cultivated innocence characterised the Andantino grazioso. Such dialectical reconciliation—not for nothing was Haydn Beethoven’s teacher—did not efface but rather brought into relief both the movement’s darker movements and the composer’s ever-astonishing powers of invention. Speaking of invention, what an extraordinary movement the Minuet is, here relished and communicated as such with evident love and understanding. Its swing said so much, as did the relaxation, finely judged, of its A major Trio. The finale fizzed with character, connoisseurship, and yes, invention. As in the first movement, performance made clear the richness of use to which Haydn puts his material. It was, again like the opening, impressive in a frankly symphonic sense that remained true to this mesmerising chamber music for Johann Peter Salomon, an earlier ‘citizen of nowhere’.


There remain—dare one even use that verb any more?—other unions for our political masters to break, not least that with us since 1707. At least for this evening, though, that could be postponed, the Maxwell players rewarding us with a little Scottish folk music, as arranged by fiddlers William Marshall and Isaac Cooper. In excellent command of the idiom, the players built and shaped both selections finely.


We were left in no doubt from the opening bars of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet that here was a very different composer from Haydn, or indeed his eighteenth-century Scots counterparts. Lyricism of a quality it is difficult not to think divine—and why would one try?—is the order of the day, and so it sounded, Anthony Friend’s liquid tone just the tonic for cares we had (almost) left without the church. Distinction of method in so many ways was communicated with an effortlessness, however apparent, however illusory, that remains nonetheless crucial to so much Mozart. The development sounded every bit as exploratory as Haydn’s, the recapitulation both returning and venturing into new, Così-like territory. That sense was furthered in a reading of the Larghetto of rare hushed intimacy, clarinet first among equals—until another instrument was. The Minuet brought ebullient contrast that yet already hinted at a vulnerability, even anguish, given fuller voice in the first trio. The second trio’s serenading chimed with both tendencies. Both uniting and providing new points of departure, Mozart’s finale once again proved the very model of Classical variation writing, transformative in a fashion difficult not to consider operatic. For, in those most European of music, wistful and joyful, we both recognise ourselves and a world now sadly, even tragically, unattainable.


Hopes to attend the final two concerts in this series, scheduled for later this week, have now been dashed by the latest preposterous restrictions. Shops, gyms, even saunas remain open; a Christmas massacre looms; yet Covid-secure chamber concerts are once again forbidden. However, there is spotlighting at the end of the tunnel; Steven Isserlis and Angela Hewitt will reschedule their recitals. Perhaps it was too much to hope that my final concert music of 2020 would be Beethoven’s opp.110 and 111. As I have recently written elsewhere, this virus-ridden world remains obstinately deaf to the music it most needs to hear. If anything can have us retain hope, it is the composer of the Ninth Symphony, with which I heard out 2019. Let us hope; let us pray.