This post is one in a sequence which lists (mostly) live music I have heard, as best as memory allows. I write to have a record of my musical experiences and these entries are intended as postcards from me to my future self. All opinions are personal, although music historians from the 25th Century may find some of them of interest.

Other posts in this collection can be found here. The most recent prior post in this sequence is here.

• Kasparas Mikužis in his debut recital at Wigmore Hall, London, on Wednesday 4 December 2024. The program:
  • Rameau: Suite in G
  • Rachmaninoff: Sonata No 1 in D minor, Op. 28

  This was an outstanding mid-day recital on the Wigmore’s Steinway piano, to a hall about two-thirds full. Mr Mikužis played one encore, a short prelude by his fellow Lithuanian Mikalojus Čiurlionis. It is charming that Mr Mikužis so often plays the music of Čiurlionis, drawing our attention to this fine composer.

  I only heard the Rachmaninoff first Sonata for the first time a few weeks ago (played by Professor Dmitri Alexeev), and I was delighted to hear it again so soon. The work is intellectually and emotionally very challenging, with a great symphony’s worth of ideas, lines of development, moods, techniques, and effects. Mr Mikužis rose superbly to its many challenges and presented a powerful and coherent reading of this masterpiece.

  How immensely different this performance was to that other Opus 28 I have Mr Mikužis play several times this past year, Chopin’s collection of 24 Preludes. Chopin’s theme in that set was death and its presentiment, and Rachmaninoff’s here (at least initially) was the legend of Faust, a story which is also about death and how one should live one’s life in face of it. I wonder where this deep thread will take Mr Mikužis next!

• Krius String Quartet to an audience of about 50 people in St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, London on Friday 22 November 2024. The quartet comprises Alfie Weinberg (v), Louis Solon (v), Theo Hayward (va), and Frederick Carter (c), all students at the Royal Academy. The programme was:
  • Haydn: String Quartet, Op. 54 No. 2
  • Puccini: Crisantemi

  This was another very fine performance by this young quartet, sounding more confident and assured than they did just a few weeks ago at St Marylebone Church. For the audience, and perhaps also the performers, the acoustic of St Bride’s is far better than at St Marylebone (where the sound seemed to disappear upwards). As in the previous concert, the descant melody over the sombre chords of the second movement of the Haydn quartet was profoundly moving.

  This concert was a wonderful experience, and I look forward eagerly to hearing Krius play again. Their lightness of touch and tight co-ordination would make them ideal performers for the quartets of Cherubini and Arriaga.

• Harp Chamber Music, by students from the Royal Academy of Music, at Regent Hall, London, Friday 15 November 2024. The programme was:
  • 1. Debussy (arranged Henk de Vlieger): Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune
  • 2. Christopher Gunning (1944-2023): Lament
  • 3. Britten: Folk Songs for High Voice
  • 4. Andre Jolivet (1905-1974): Chant de Linos

  The performers were:

  • 1: Ethan Osman (conductor), Jamie McClenaghan (flute), Benjamin Atkinson (clarinet), Katie Sherratt (harp), Sara Maxman (v), Polina Sharafyan (v), Charlie Howells (va), Jayden Lamcellari (c).
  • 2: Jayden Lamcellari (c) and Megan Humphries (harp).
  • 3: Isobel Cleverly (soprano), Sofiia Nikolaiets (soprano), Huw Boucher (harp), Katie Lo (harp).
  • 4: Efrem Workman (flute), Sara Maxman (v), Charlie Howells (va), Jayden Lamcellari (c), Huw Boucher (harp).

  This was an exquisite and delicate programme, with all the works played expertly, to a near-full hall. Christopher Gunning’s very moving Lament was written in response to the horrors of the war in Syria. Among the Britten songs was David of the White Rock, which I once set myself (for tenor) when at school.

  Jolivet’s very challenging Chant de Linos was apparently a 1944 commission for a flute competition that was won by Jean-Pierre Rampal. With such a provenance, it would be a brave flautist who even attempted it, and so hats off to Mr Efrem Workman. He played it superbly, with a strong coherence of line, and without apparent effort. I was reminded of a short poem by Piet Hein:

  There is but one art,
  No more, no less:
  To do all things
  With artlessness.”

• Academy of Ancient Music at Milton Court Concert Hall, Guildhall School of Music, London, on Thursday 14 November 2024. The program comprised four symphonies from the four masters of the 18th century symphony: Vanhal, Mozart, Haydn and von Dittersdorf.
  • Vanhal: Symphony in D D17
  • Mozart: Symphony No. 36 in C “Linz”, K425
  • Dittersdorf: Symphony No. 4 in F
  • Haydn: Symphony No. 80 in D minor Hob1/80

  The AAM is an ensemble that tries to present historically-authentic performances. Hence the orchestra was quite slim – just three first and three second violins, for example. I think that would be fine if they were performing in an historically-accurate physical place to an historically-accurate audience. But even the Milton Court Concert Hall, which was perhaps 90% full, had many more people present in a much larger room than I imagine would have ever heard any single performance of these works at the time they were written. So, although they performed very well, the AAM orchestra sounded too thin for my taste.

  Of the four works played, the Vanhal is by far the best. For the record (and for my own memory), my personal ranking of symphonies of that era is as follows (in descending order):

  • 1. The last three symphonies of Mozart
  • 2. The Sturm und Drang symphonies of Haydn (roughly those written between 1766 – 1773)
  • 3. All of the symphonies of Vanhal
  • 4. All other symphonies, including the others of Haydn and Mozart.

• Vikungur Ólafsson with the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Edward Gardner at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on Wednesday 6 November 2024, playing Brahms’ First Piano Concerto.
  

  This was superb performance to an almost full hall, and I had a very good seat in the rear stalls with a direct line of sight to the keyboard. It was amazing to hear how softly Mr Ólafsson played, especially in the second movement, with 2000 or so people sitting immensely quietly to hear him. This Concerto is growing on me, although I still consider Brahms’ music to be long-winded (he is the musical equivalent of Henry James), and the second movement in particular I find to be too long. I could not stay for the second half, which included a new piece by Freya Waley-Cohen and Bartok’s The Miraculous Mandarin Suite.

• Jan Liebermann on the organ of the Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, London on Saturday 26 October 2024. The programme was (in a slight change from the printed list):
  • JS Bach: Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major, BWV 564
  • Jean Langlais (1907-1991): III Chant de paix from Neuf Pieces
  • Alfred Hollins (1865-1942): Concert Overture No. 2 in C minor
  • Samuel Sebastian Wesley (1810-18760: Larghetto in F sharp minor
  • Zsolt Gardonyi (born 1946): Hommage a Marcel Dupre
  • Marcel Dupre (1886-1971): Trois Preludes et Fugues Op. 7 (No 1 in B major, No 2 in F minor and No. 3 in G minor)

  This was an outstanding afternoon recital by a young German organist to an audience of about 60 people. I appreciated the three brief introductions to the works played given by Mr Liebermann. Most of the audience were seated downstairs, so it was very good that his performance was relayed live from cameras in the organ loft to three large video screens at the front of the church. It is a wonder of our particular era – still working with imperfect technology – that even across a distance of only a few metres, the sound of the organ reached us before the video images did, with a delay of about half a second. Thus, for instance, it took some getting used to hearing a sudden loud chord and then seeing Mr Liebermann’s hands play it. For this reason, I stopped watching the video screens after a while.

  All the works were played superbly, with great technical facility and musicality, and with a large variety of organ sounds and effects. Mr Liebermann appeared to know this particular organ well. I especially liked the Concert Overture by Alfred Hollins. The most exciting work he performed was in fact the encore, Bach’s Badinerie from Orchestral Suite No 2 in B minor, BWV 1067, in an arrangement for organ, I think by Jean Guillot (1930-2019). The concert was worth attending for this one joyful and virtuosic work alone. Congratulations to Mr Liebermann for bringing it so well to life.

  Mr Liebermann has posted a clip of himself playing the Badinerie (on the Father Willis organ of Salisbury Cathedral) on IG, here. His cross-over footwork is a marvel to behold.

  This recital reminded me of hearing another superb young organist, Cameron Carpenter, once in Cottonopolis.

• Leonard Bernstein’s two operas, Trouble in Tahiti (1952) and A Quiet Place (1983), performed by the Royal Ballet and Opera Company at the Linbury Theatre, Royal Opera, Covent Garden London, on 22 October 2024.
  

  The RBO’s website says these performances are sold out (and has said so for months), but I had no trouble getting a ticket last week, and there were dozens of empty seats on the evening I attended. This was an outstanding performance of these two operas, with very good singing and acting. The orchestra performance was also superb, and it was nice to able to see four of the percussionists who were at stalls level (not in the orchestra pit). The music was recognizably Bernstein’s and, particularly for the second opera, it sounded repeatedly as if it was about to break into a number from West Side Story. Despite being recognizably Bernstein’s, the music isn’t very good.

  Before the start, an American patron in the foyer told me that these two operas were very dark. I did not think them dark, so much as overly melodramatic and anguished. So much angst, so little plot. And so much time – the second opera could have been cut in half with no loss of anything – not message, nor meaning, nor musical pleasure. How could the composer of the taut West Side Story also write such never-ending meanderings? I am pleased that I heard these two operas, but I would not choose to hear them again.

  And, forty years on from its composition, I wonder what Bernstein was trying to say with his quotation of Henry Mancini’s Baby Elephant Walk, played by layered strings? What will anyone think in 100 years, when even we, today, don’t get it?

• Professor Dmitri Alexeev, in a late afternoon recital for the Chopin Society, at Westminster Cathedral Hall, London on 20 October 2024. The program:
  • Rachmaninoff: Sonata No 1 in D minor, Op. 28

  INTERVAL

  • Chopin: Three Nocturnes (Op 48#2 in F-sharp minor, Op 62#2 in E, Op 27#1 in C-sharp minor)
  • Chopin: Impromptu No. 3 in G-flat minor, Op. 51
  • Chopin: Three Nouvelle Etudes (#1 in F minor, #2 in A-flat, #3 in D-flat)
  • Chopin: Five Polish Songs (arranged by Liszt)

  Mr Alexeev’s performance was superb, and I was indeed fortunate to hear it. A portrait of Chopin was placed behind the piano, as befits a concert for the Chopin Society. The Rachmaninoff Sonata was new to me, and apparently the composer had initially begun the work inspired by the legend of Faust. This idea was still evident in the final work, which had a very strong intellectual energy, with musical ideas from one movement returning and being developed in later movements. Who could have imagined that ordinary scales could sound demonic, as they did here? This Sonata is an intellectual tour de force and Mr Alexeev’s playing made the ideas and their development clear. Composed in Dresden, this Sonata was apparently given its first performance by Konstantin Igumnov (1873-1948) in Moscow on 17 October 1908.

  The Chopin works of the second half of the recital all sounded slight and somewhat shallow, in comparison with the intellectual heft of the Rachmaninoff. All these works were played beautifully by Mr Alexeev, and I like (and have played) many of them, but I did not feel in any of these works the semantic depth of the Rachmaninoff. Nonetheless, this was a superb recital. (HT to AD for alerting me.)

  And here is the review of the concert by Mr Christopher Axworthy.

  And just after Halloween, on Saturday 2 November, pianist Kasparas Mikuzis will perform the Rachmanninoff 1st Sonata at a recital in Forest Row, East Sussex.

• Emanuil Ivanov in a mid-day solo piano recital at the Wigmore Hall, London, Wednesday 9 October 2024. Mr Ivanov played Frederick Rzewski’s variations “The People United will Never be Defeated”. This was a very powerful performance (from a score) to a hall about half full. After the emotional roller-coaster of the set of variations, Mr Ivanov calmed us down with a Song Without Words by Felix Mendelssohn as the one encore.
  

• Krius String Quartet to an afternoon audience of about 70 people in St Marylebone Parish Church, Marylebone, London on Friday 4 October 2024. The quartet comprises Alfie Weinberg (v), Louis Solon (v), Theo Hayward (va), and Frederick Carter (c), all students at the Royal Academy across the road. The programme was:
  • Haydn: String Quartet, Op. 54 No. 2
  • Puccini: Crisantemi
  • Cohen: Hallelujah
  • Electric Light Orchestra: Mr Blue Sky

  This Church has a very high ceiling, and I thought the sound tended to become lost in the vast space. The concert was billed as informal, and some audience members were moved by what they heard to react, in words or in bodily motions. The audience applauded with enthusiasm after every movement and seemed to appreciate most the last two numbers, perhaps because they recognized the theme tunes. The audience reactions were invariably warm and positive, and I found this very charming.

  The musical performance by Krius was excellent and I enjoyed the concert immensely. The Haydn quartet was new to me, and I was particularly touched by the slow movement and its melancholic chords and descant melodic line. The precision of intonation and co-ordination of Krius as an ensemble were excellent throughout, and they are a string quartet to watch out for!

  After I left the concert, immediately outside the church I crossed at the green walk signal, and came within inches of being killed by a car running a red light. If I had died then, this concert would have been the last I heard (at least in this life). I have since been thinking a great deal about this.

• Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy in a two-piano recital to a sold-out Wigmore Hall on Friday 4 October 2024. This was an outstanding and very moving lunchtime recital consisting of preludes and fugues of JS Bach and of Dmitri Shostakovich, interleaved with one another. The printed programme listed:
  

  Dmitry Shostakovich: Prelude and Fugue in C major Op. 87 (1950-1)
  JS Bach: Prelude and Fugue in G minor from WTC II BWV885 (c.1740)
  Shostakovich: Prelude and Fugue in D Op. 87
  Bach: Prelude and Fugue in D minor from WTC II BWV875
  Shostakovich: Prelude and Fugue in D minor Op. 87
  Bach: Prelude and Fugue in G minor from WTC I BWV861 (1722)
  Shostakovich: Prelude in C sharp minor Op. 87
  Bach: Fugue in C sharp minor from WTC I BWV849
  Bach: Prelude in E flat from WTC I BWV852
  Shostakovich: Fugue in E flat Op. 87
  Shostakovich: Prelude and Fugue in G minor Op. 87
  Bach: Prelude and Fugue in C from WTC I BWV846.

  The pianists played one encore, a Bach chorale arranged for four hands on one piano. Sitting together at one piano seemed a very fitting end to a concert of such back-and-forth interplay.

  Most of us westerners have a linear model of time, with people and events in the past able to influence those in the present and future, but not the reverse. We would therefore, most of us, think of Bach influencing Shostakovich, and Shostakovich choosing Bach as an influence, or at least not resisting this influence. Bach is essentially passive in this exchange.

  Cultures with a different model of time, however, such as indigenous Australian cultures, who think of different eras or generations being overlayed, or stacked, over the same geographic location to which they are linked, allow for influences to travel in all directions – forwards, backwards and diagonally. In this view, Bach has actively chosen who will be influenced by him, through the particular music he has written.

  This may seem a strange notion, but since the WWW, we are actually quite familiar with it. Web 2.0 not only allowed people with similar interests to find each other, it helped create these groups of like-minded people, no matter where they were. If someone starts a weblog about language, such as Language Log, people interested in that topic will read and, many of them, comment on the posts. In time, this will create a community of people interested in, and increasingly expert on, the topic of the blog. The community will develop its own norms of behavior, its own assumptions and common forms of reasoning, and its own shibboleths and sometimes enemies. They will do this without being in the one place, or being online at the same time, or even being alive at the same time. As an example of such assumptions, the focus of Language Log, for instance, is almost entirely on the forms and syntax of human language, and only rarely on its semantics or pragmatics.

  Similarly, Bach’s music has created, through the centuries, a community of people who it communicates to, people who appreciate its musical sounds and its musical forms, who understand its meanings (or wish to), and who respond, in different ways, to it. This community is spread over geography, over time, and over musical abilities. Bach has, by writing his music in the ways he did, actively selected the people who will be influenced by it. They are not, usually, people who like the waltzes of Johann Strauss Jr, for example.

  So Bach is not, in fact, passive in this exchange. Has his music also been influenced by later composers? Certainly, as I have pointed out before, the music of later composers can change how we listen to the music of earlier composers, so that, for example, depending on the context and the interpretation, Bach can sound like Ligeti. Something similar happened in this concert – hearing Bach interleaved with Shostakovich allowed us to hear the influences between the two composers in both directions. For me, this was a profoundly moving experience, and it will take some time to absorb its full intellectual and emotional consequences.

  The back-and-forth nature of the performance also led me, as a computer scientist, to think of Ehrenfeucht–Fraïssé Games. I will explore these ideas in a further post.

• The Somerset Piano Trio (Warren Mailley Smith, p, Jenny Sacha, v, and Kirsten Jenson, c) playing to about 50 people at St Mary-Le-Strand Church, London on Thursday 26 September 2024. This was a masterful performance through the darkening gloom of the church, of two fine piano trios:
  • Beethoven: Piano Trio Op. 1 No. 1 in E flat
  • Schubert: Piano Trio in B flat
• London Firebird Orchestra with violinist Charlotte Saluste-Bridoux under George Jackson at St George’s Church, Hanover Square, London on Tuesday 24 September 2024. The program comprised just two works:
  • Beethoven: Violin Concerto
  • Mozart: Symphony No. 41 (Jupiter)

  A great concert, with superb, polished performances by Ms Saluste-Bridoux and the Firebird orchestra to a full church. The wonderful acoustics of the church compensate for the extreme discomfort of sitting on the hard, wooden pews.

  The cadenzas for the Beethoven were ones which I had not heard before, and they had a distinct twentieth-century feel. I understand they were written by Alfred Schnittke (Movements 1 and 3) and Gidon Kremer (Movement 2). The (novel) entry of the strings near the end of Schnittke’s third movement cadenza was magical – a sequence of shimmering discords that ascended, ratcheting up the tension as they rose in pitch. The choice of these particular cadenzas was inspired, and added immensely to the performance. (HT: CSB)

  As often with the Jupiter, the contrapuntal exuberance of the final movement energized me immensely, to the point where I felt capable of running after strangers on St George Street to tell them how superb this performance had been, and how much I wished I’d been a musician!

• Peter Jablonski in a recital of Polish piano music at the Wigmore Hall, London, on 21 September 2024. The program was (here listed in the order of playing, which was different to the printed version):
  • Karol Szymanowski: Serenade de Don Juan from Masques Op. 34 (1915-16), Calypso from Metopes Op. 29 (1915), Mazurkas Op 50. No. 1 & 2 (1924-6)
  • Roland Stevenson: Manru Suite (1961), based on music of Paderewski
  • Grazyna Bacewicz: Sonata No. 2 (1953)

  This was a very fine solo performance of Polish and Polish-inspired music by a pianist of Polish descent, to a hall about two-thirds full. Mr Jablonski’s playing was superb, and very confident and controlled. Stevenson’s suite on themes of Padarewski was written in a late romantic style, while the other two works were definitely 20th-century sound worlds. Although written in 1953, the Sonata by Bacewicz was of an inter-way style in its rhythms and tonality. Both the Bacewicz Sonata and the Szymanowksi pieces were modernist in rhythm, and atonal in sound. Mr Jablonski returned three times to the stage, and played one encore, which was by Chopin.

  A question that has just struck me: Formal logic flourished in Poland between the wars, arising from the Szkoła Lwowsko-Warszawska established in 1895 by Kazimierz Twardowski in Lemberg, Austro-Hungary (now Lviv, Ukraine). I wonder what connection exists between that phenomenon and the great tradition of Polish piano music and piano playing that arose from Chopin and continues to this day, through pianists such as Mr Jablonski.

• Versa Winds Saxophone Quartet at St. Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, London, 13 September 2024. The quartet comprised: Louisa Kataria (soprano sax), Lydia Cochrane (alto sax), Alex Dani (tenor sax) and Annabella Trench (standing in for Ethan Townsend, baritone sax). The program was:
  • Pedro Iturralde: Suite Hellénique
  • Fernande Decruck: Saxofonia di camera
  • Richard Rodney Bennett: Saxophone Quartet.

  Some very fine playing to an audience of about 35 people. The playing was very tightly co-ordinated, especially in the interesting rhythms of Bennett’s Saxophone Quartet. The Eastern Mediterranean sounds of the Iturralde work were enchanting.

• Members of the Australian Romantic and Classical Orchestra in a programme of mostly classical string quartets and clarinet quartets, in Studio 1 of the Old Museum Building, Brisbane, 29 August 2024. The performers were: Nicole van Bruggen (Basset clarinet, a replica of the original Stadler version, with a bulbous bell), Rachael Beesley (violin), Alison Rayner (violin), Stephen King (viola) and Natasha Kraemer (cello), and they played on period instruments, or modern instruments inspired by period instruments.
  • Vincenzo Gambaro: Clarinet Quartet #1 in B-flat
  • Mozart: String Quartet #4 in C, K.157
  • Beethoven: Cavatina from String Quartet #13 in E-flat, Op. 130
  • Nicole Murphy: Wavelength

  The audience was about 100 strong, in a room with high ceilings and very good acoustics. The composer of the final work, Nicole Murphy, was present for the performance, and her piece, composed only recently, was in three movements (fast, slow, and fast). This piece required the player of the Basset clarinet to stop the hole at the base of the instrument three times – this can only be done by holding the instrument with the knees. The third movement had a syncopated sprung rhythm, which she called a “funky groove”, played as an ostinato by the strings with a clarinet obligato part running over it. The up and down groove was apparently intended to convey the experience of being in a small boat in rough seas. In truth, the funky ostinato would have made an admirable work, in a rhythmic minimalist style, by itself, without the clarinet part. (But then, I almost always prefer watching or hearing just the background in art and music.)

  I do find it ironic (or perhaps hypocritical) to make a fuss about playing on period instruments for 18th Century music when the string players use shoulder rests. We were also in a room with electric light, although not air conditioning in the warmth of a Brisbane winter evening.

• Queensland Symphony Orchestra under Johannes Fritzsch at QPAC Concert Hall, South Bank, Brisbane, on Saturday 24 August 2024:
  • Schubert: Symphony in B Minor, D.759 (Unfinished)
  • Bruckner: Symphony No. 9 in D minor (Unfinished)

  The Concert Hall was about 70% full for this afternoon performance, with a median age likely beyond 65 years. The performance began with an extended tribute to an obscure ABC audio engineer who was retiring. As with newspapers publishing obituaries of unknown back-office staff, this delay to the start of the concert felt like an abuse of power: the management of the orchestra were stealing our time for this unwelcome interruption to the advertised program merely because they could.

  Once the concert got going, the orchestral playing was excellent, although I think the Schubert would have better if it had been played slightly faster. The Bruckner is called The Unfinished, but a more accurate title would be The Interminable. This work is tedious and boring, especially the final movement, and the composer could have expressed its ideas in about one-third of the time taken.

• Johan Dalene, violin, and Christian Ihle Hadland, piano, in a recital at Wigmore Hall, Sunday 28 July 2024 (the final concert of the 2023-2024 season). This was an excellent performance from a very happy violinist to a hall about three-quarters full, in a program of:
  • Beethoven: Violin Sonata No. 7 in C minor, Op 30 No 2 (1801-1802)
  • Debussy: Violin Sonata in G Minor, (1916-1917)
  • Interval
  • Grazyan Bacewicz: Humoresque (1953), Kolysanka (1952), Slavonic Dance (1952) and Witraz (1932)
  • Franck: Sonata in A for Violin and Piano(1886)

  The performers played one encore. As with the four Bacewicz pieces, Mr Dalene played the encore from memory.

• The Sitkovetsky Trio at the Wigmore Hall, Wednesday 24 July 2024. The trio comprises: Alexander Sitkovetsky, violin, Isang Enders, cello and Wu Qian, piano. This was a very fine performance to a full house. The programme:
  • Clara Schumann: Andante from Piano Trio in G minor, Op 17 (1846)
  • Felix Mendelssohn: Piano Trio No 1 in D Minor, Op, 49 (1839)
  • Beethoven: Piano Trio in B flat, Op. 97 (“Archduke”)
  • Encore: Cécile Chaminade: Slow movement from a piano trio.
• After an unpleasant experience in the past week at a concert in Wigmore Hall, I have written a short reflection on what I believe are the responsibilities of audience members in classical music concerts, here.
  

• Jan Lisiecki in a solo recital, Preludes, at the Wigmore Hall, London, 18 July 2024. The programme was the same as that in his February 2024 recital in Cambridge, UK, which I described here. As in February, Mr Lisiecki played one encore, a Romance by Schumann (Op 28, No 2).
  

  This was again an outstanding performance, which I felt very privileged to have heard. Mr Lisiecki’s playing was again assertive and confident, and was perhaps even more controlled than in February. I was sitting closer to the stage than I had been in Cambridge and did not feel that any work was being played too fast for me to process. The programme made increasing sense intellectually, which may indicate my own learning in the time since first hearing it.

  Mr Lisiecki is a rare pianist who can make Bach sound like Ligeti. He achieves this by playing extremely quickly, thereby putting the performance on to the edge of impossibility and risking a breakdown in synchronization of his hands. At the same time (perhaps in consequence) his touch is very light, which produces an ethereal sound.

• Leslie Howard, in a piano recital of 19th Century Russian Masters, at the Wigmore Hall, London, 16 July 2024. The programme:
  • Borodin: Petite Suite and Scherzo (1885)
  • Glazunov: Theme et Variations, Op. 72 (1900)
  • Anton Rubinstein: Piano Sonata No. 4 in A Minor, Op. 100 (ca. 1876-1880)
  • Encore: Anton Rubinstein: Barcarolle No. 1

  Mr Howard’s playing was superb, in a hall only about one-third full. For me, this concert felt like a companion concert to the recital by Ian Pace I was fortunate to hear on 28 May 2024 of 20th Century Russian and Ukrainian composers. Borodin’s Suite is pleasant, but slight. In contrast, Rubinstein’s 4th Sonata was substantial, and at times, thrilling. The second movement, with its recurring pattern of five repeated notes, brought to mind Boris Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto of 1971.

  Glazunov’s work was also substantial, but suffers from a feature I find in most 19th century compositions in theme-and-variations form: the individual variations are too short to allow any development of the material, and so they simply create a mood or evoke an emotion. But there is no connection (or none which is apparent to a listener) between one variation and the next – in other words, there is no emotional or narrative arc across the entirety of the work. So, what we hear are a fleeting sequence of emotions, separate sound episodes one after another, like cloud shapes moving quickly across the sky, with nothing to connect them together or to justify the particular order in which they appear. Only the initial theme and the final variation felt to be positioned in those places for some good reasons.

• Domchor and Dombläser under Domkantor Benedikt Celler in a performance of Christopher Tambling’s Missa Brevis in B-flat in Frauenkirche, Munich, Germany, at 10am Mass, Sunday 14 July 2024.
  

  This was an outstanding performance, with two trumpets, two trombones and tubular bells, as well as the Cathedral organ and choir. Prior to each of the communal hymns during the Mass, the organist played a prelude or voluntary, usually an interesting short fugue. For a chorale setting by Mendelssohn, the prior organ voluntary was an improvisation in the high soprano register on an ornament from the hymn, interspersed with successive phrases from the hymn. This treatment was quite magical.

  At the recessional, a very robust organ fugue, with an assertive even strident theme, was performed by two organists playing four-hands (ie, sitting alongside each other at the same console). I have not ever seen an organ duo of this form before.

  It is always nice to attend services of a universal church. The family of five (two parents, late teenage son and two daughters) seated in front of me were not speakers of German and the mother read the mass liturgy from her mobile phone in their own language, which perhaps was Catalan. Yet we all exchanged the sign of peace in English.

• Sophie Neeb and Vincent Neeb (Klavierduo Neeb), Peter Schöne (Bariton) and the Münchner Motettenchor under Benedikt Haag, Leitung, in a superb performance in Matthäuskirche, München, Germany on Saturday 13 July 2024. The programme:
  • Johannes X. Schachtner: Vorfrühling (Uraufführung)
  • Robert Schumann: Klavierquartett Es-Dur, Op. 47, Satz 3 (Andante Cantabile) (Arranged for piano 4-hands by Johannes Brahms)
  • Robert Schumann: Dichterliebe (for Bariton, Chor and Klavier zu vier Händen, arr. Johannes X. Schachtner) (Uraufführung)

  The songs of the composer Johannes X. Schachtner which opened the concert were very interesting musically, and used texts by Fritz Raßmann, Annette v. Droste-Hülshoff, Karl Marx and Heinrich Heine. These songs and the arrangement which Herr Schachtner made of Schumann’s Dichterliebe had many unusual musical effects, with choir members sometimes softly whispering and even playing hand bells, and playing in multiple time signatures. The choir acted like a Greek chorus, commenting on and responding to the soloist. This was a masterful arrangement of the Schumann cycle, sung and played superbly. I came away from hearing it on a high.

  This was an outstanding concert and a superb performance by everyone, to a church only about half full. The modernist church, which is the home of the Lutheran Bishop for the region, has curved walls which bounce the sound around the room and so provided excellent acoustics for this concert. This evening was my first time to hear live a performance by Klavierduo Neeb, who deserve their very strong reputation. I was privileged and fortunate to have heard this wonderful concert.

• Passing Strange, musical by Stew (Mark Lamar Stewart) at The Young Vic Theatre, Wednesday 3 July 2024. This is a very witty and funny musical, with superb singing, dancing and acting and a compelling story. I loved the parody of European avant-garde art cinema. From an audience member after a full dress rehearsal: “Everyone seeks the real in real-life, but it does not exist in real-life, only in art.”
• Lyon International Piano Competition in Lyon, France, 3 – 7 July 2024. Congratulations to the winners and to all the participants. Unfortunately, the rounds of this competition were not live-streamed, not even the final concerto concert.
  

  Update 19 October 2024: Over the last two days, some videos of the competition performances and the final concert on 7 July 2024 have now been uploaded to Youtube. Unfortunately, these recordings are of poor sound quality, with lots of extraneous noises in the audio (a squeaky chair near the microphone? a mobile phone?), and with people walking in front of the camera. And, at the end of the performances, adverts for the next recording are placed over the soloists, so we cannot see them as they acknowledge audience applause. I would expect an international competition to have higher technical standards than this.

• RCM Saxophone Ensemble End of Year concert, Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall, Royal College of Music, Tuesday 2 July 2024. Programme was:
  • Gustav Holst (arranged Gary Bricault): Brook Green Suite
  • Clare Loveday: Revolution Envy
  • Steve Reich (arranged Susan Fancher): New York Counterpoint
  • Yasuhide Ito: La Danza di Terra (UK premiere)
  • Interval
  • Nicola LeFanu: In the Forests of the Night (London premiere)
  • Ian Stewart: Concerto Grosso 1

  All the works were for saxophone ensembles, ranging in size from 8 to 12 players. For the last work, a piano was added to the nine saxophones. The composers for the last two works were present at the concert.

  This was an excellent evening, with very fine performances all round. Reich’s “NY Counterpoint”, with its shimmering sound world, is always beautiful. The piece by LeFanu used microtonalities, which required unusual fingering and much additional practice beforehand from the players. The middle (slow) section of this work was very beautiful. The slow movement of the work by Stewart was also beautiful. With familiar music by Reich and with new works, this concert allowed me an opportunity to catch up with an old friend and to meet some new friends.

• Chamber music from students of the Royal College of Music at St Mary Abbots Church, Kensington, on Friday 28 June 2024. The programme and performers were:
  • Ravel: Jeu d’eau, Kailing Zhang, piano
  • Klughardt: Wind Quintet Op. 79, Opus Winds: Viviane Ghiglino, flute, Patricia Khachkalyan Gomes, oboe, Connor Hargreaves, clarinet, Lucas Boardman, horn, Emily Ambrose, bassoon
  • Saariaho: Nocturne for solo violin, Sharon Zhou, violin
  • JS Bach: Chaconne in D minor, arranged for four violas, Wyatt Li, Anthony Ip, Hugo Svensson, Florence Cope
  • Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, First Movement, Sharon Zhou, violin, Zhi Hsuan Lim, violin, Rosie Rowe, viola, Alina Maries-Reim, cello.

  This was a collection of very fine performances to an audience of about 50 people. Each work was introduced by one of the performers, which was admirable. Shostakovich in this movement apparently used traditional Russian Jewish village wedding themes; the result was not at all happy or upbeat.

  The performance of the Bach arrangement was profound, and the viola register seemed to reveal something dark about the Chaconne that the original violin version does not.

• Arsenii Moon in a piano recital at Steinway Hall, London, Wednesday 26 June 2024. The programme:
  • Bach/Busoni: Nun Komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV659 (
  • Beethoven: Sonata #31 in A-flat major, Op. 110
  • Chopin: Two Mazurkas, Op. 6, No. 1 and Op. 17, No. 4
  • Chopin: Barcarolle, Op. 60
  • Rachmaninov: Etudes-Tableaux, Op. 39, No. 2 & No. 5
  • Debussy: Cloches a travers les feuilles (from Images, Series II)
  • Debussy: Feux d’Artifice (from Preludes, Book II)
  • Liszt: Transcendental Etude No. 4 in D minor, “Mazeppa”, S.100

  This was a masterful performance by the winner of the 2023 Busoni Competition to about 35 people, an almost-full room. Mr Moon’s playing was immensely forceful and powerful, yet he did not overwhelm the space. The audience included Mr Alim Beisembayev, winner of the 2021 Leeds Piano Competition, as well as several other soon-to-be-famous pianists.

  And here is a great review of the recital from Christopher Axworthy, who interviewed Mr Moon after the performance.

• London Symphony Orchestra under Gianandrea Noseda performing Prokofiev’s 7th Symphony, at the Barbican, London, on Wednesday 19 June 2024.
• The Elias Quartet in a concert of Felix Mendelssohn’s chamber music, including the Octet (with the Heath Quartet), at Wigmore Hall, London, Tuesday 18 June 2024. The programme:
  • String Quartet No. 4 in E minor, Op. 44 No. 2 (1837)
  • String Quintet No. 1 in A, Op. 18 (1826, rev. 1832) (with Gary Pomery, viola)
  • Interval
  • Octet in E flat, Op, 20 (1825)

  This was an outstanding performance to a hall about three-quarters full. The Octet was one of the most joyous performances I have heard of this work: it is clear that the performers were having great fun playing it together.

• The London Orlando Orchestra under Claudia Jablonski with soloists Alexander Doronin (piano) and Volodymyr Bykhun (trumpet) in a concert in St Cyprian’s Church, Clarence Gate, London on Sunday 16 June 2024. The programme:
  • Shostakovich: Concerto for Piano and Trumpet
  • Schubert: Symphony No. 8 “Unfinished”

  About 60 people attended this free concert in the beautiful St Cyprian’s Anglican church, near to Regent’s Park. The Church has a compact Brentwood grand piano. The Orlando Orchestra comprises mostly student musicians and I understand was only founded by Ms Jablonski last year. The performance was absolutely stunning, and both works filled the church. The Schubert was superb, tightly played and serious, and profoundly moving. It is hard to believe that such a new ensemble could play so well together. Ms Jablonski is a conductor to watch out for.

  I have not ever heard the Shostakovich better played than this, and indeed this sublime performance joins my short list of transcendent musical experiences. This performance was one for the ages. The playing of the two soloists, Mr Doronin and Mr Bykhun, were both confident and assured. There is a lot of humour in this concerto and the feeling of fun was evident here: everyone was enjoying themselves immensely. The ending is a humorous race to the finish, and the piano part even includes some honky-tonk and two glissandos. What a joyous and uplifting experience this was.

  This performance was in great contrast to a very dour version of the same concerto that I heard once at the Barbican, back in 2013.

• A concert of new music by composer Jasper Eaglesfield at St Mary-le-Strand Church, London, Thursday 13 June 2024, part of The Strand Contemporary Music Series. The programme:
  • Never Safe, for solo snare drum (2022)
  • January, for solo piano (2020)
  • Birthday Letters, for string quartet (2018)
  • And the Elephants frolic in the Abbatoir, for piano trio (2021)
  • Never Asleep, for solo vibraphone (2020)
  • Conflicting Agreements, for violin and two violas (2019)
  • Etude No. 11, for solo piano (2024)
  • Belles, for piano trio (2024

  The performers were:

  • Violin: Faye Lam
  • Violin/viola: Scott Storey
  • Viola: Declan Wicks
  • Cello: Nok Him Chan
  • Piano: Gordon Chan
  • Percussion: Isaac Harari

  The performances were uniformly excellent. The music was very well-crafted, and was mostly in a tonal idiom. I found the works composed more recently to be more interesting than the earlier ones. Given the composer’s evident abilities, it would be nice if he were to be more adventurous in exploring different classical idioms.

• The London Firebird Orchestra under conductor Michael Thrift with violinist Yury Revich Olario in a very fine concert at the beautiful St George’s Church, Hanover Square, on Tuesday 11 June 2024. This was apparently the fifth time Mr Revich Olario has appeared with the Firebird Orchestra. The church was full, with perhaps 200 people present, most of whom appear to have dressed up for the occasion. Dressing-up is not something London concert audiences do much anymore, in my experience. The programme:
  • Revich Olario: Prelude
  • Gershwin/Frolov: Fantasy on themes from Porgy and Bess
  • Revich Olario: Choriner Wald (the Forest of Chorin)
  • Massenet: Méditation from Thais
  • Bizet/Sarasate: Carmen Fantasy
  • Interval
  • Sibelius: Symphony No. 2

  The acoustics of this church are excellent. Because of the large size of the orchestra, the harpist was positioned behind a column. Where I was sitting, the sound of the harp reached me after having bounced off a side wall, which gave me (seated in the middle centre) a nice stereo effect.

  The performance throughout was excellent, and particularly in the two medleys of themes by Gershwin and Bizet. The two compositions by Mr Revich Olario were both well-written and well-orchestrated (and well-played), but did not sound (on this single hearing) to be very interesting harmonically or rhythmically. They could have been written in 1850 and, in their effects, they had a certain Hollywood-esque feeling. There is nothing wrong with this, and the audience certainly liked them. But I wonder why someone so good at orchestration (and at performance) is not more adventurous harmonically, and not apparently alert to the possibilities to play with rhythm that minimalism has enabled for us.

  I stayed for the Sibelius, although I find his music mostly too dark and overwrought. This was a very good performance of the Second Symphony in a space that took and held the sound, before releasing it. I still wonder what Sibelius intended to convey with all the pauses and gaps in his music, inserting silence like some musical Harold Pinter. Or is the time between performances of his symphonies the real silence?

  Something strange: The Firebird Orchestra prints out the names of the buyers of pre-purchased tickets in large type on A4 sheets and puts these sheets on the book-rests of the pews. Why they go to this trouble and expense, instead of just numbering the seats, I don’t know. This practice, surely, breaches GDPR, as all around us can see our names, something for which we certainly did not give witting consent. They cannot argue business necessity for the practice, as every other performance venue survives without doing it.

  As well as having fine acoustics and being remarkably beautiful, St George’s Hanover Square has another distinction: It is – perhaps – the only London church whose Director of Music is the son of a Fields Medallist.

• Alexander Doronin in an exam recital to a fortunate audience of nine people (together with two assessors) in the East Parry Room (aka the Carne Room) at the Royal College of Music, London at 9.40am on Sunday 9 June 2024. The programme was:
  • Elena Firsova: Hymn to Spring, Op. 64 (1993)
  • Robert Schumann: Kreisleriana, Op. 16

  Mr Doronin played both works from memory, in a thrilling recital on a Fazioli piano in a room with high ceilings and very good acoustics, up in the attic of the RCM. Mr Doronin’s playing was superb. He was articulate and forceful, and the playing sounded more assured on these two works than it had seemed just a week ago. I particularly liked his strong treatment of the first Intermezzo and of Movement #7 in the Schumann. This recital was one of the handful of great performances I have experienced.

  Despite my having heard the Kreisleriana (written in 1838, revised 1850) many times over the years, it only occurred to me hearing this performance today that the last movement is written in a style similar to the so-called “fairy music” string ensemble style of Felix Mendelssohn, a style that became associated with him (Mendelssohn) from after the Scherzo of his Octet (1825). The name of this style is due to Mendelssohn’s sister, Fanny. Mendelssohn was most likely influenced by the Scherzo of the first string quartet of Liugi Cherubini, written in 1814. Mendelssohn and his father met with Cherubini in Paris in 1825.

  One of my earliest orchestral experiences was with a one-off scatch orchestra & choir of amateur players created by the inspiring David Urquhart-Jones in Far Northern NSW which rehearsed & performed a concert in Grafton over one weekend, five decades ago. My father read about the upcoming event in the local paper, called up to ask if I could participate, and ended up being invited to join it also. Everyone met mid Saturday morning to sight-read the pieces, and then held group and individual practice sessions on Saturday afternoon & evening and Sunday morning, with a public performance mid Sunday afternoon. We learnt and played Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte & Hubert H. Parry’s Blest Pair of Sirens. It was enormous fun. After all those years, it seemed somehow fateful to be sitting in a room named for Parry, as if that earlier experience was pointing to this one.

• The Meraki String Quartet, founded by students at the Royal Academy of Music, in a very fine early evening recital to about 25 people at St Mary-Le-Strand Church, on Friday 7 June 2024. The programme was:
  • Haydn: String Quartet Op.20 No.5 in F minor
  • Felix Mendelssohn: String Quartet Op.13 No.2 in A minor
• Five by 5 Trumpet Quintet in a lunchtime concert at St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, Friday 7 June 2024. This was an outstanding performance to a large audience. About 50 people were present, which is more than double the usual number at these concerts, and included a good mix of young and old. Churches, with their longer resonance, are good places for brass ensembles, and it was nice to see the Quintet take advantage of the space for their initial procession from a side gallery into the main body of the church.
  

  The programme was:

  • C Monteverdi: Toccata from L’Orfeo
  • C Monteverdi: Damigella tutta bella (arranged by Sasha Canter)
  • Dietrich Becker: Canzona a 5 (arranged by Sasha Canter)
  • Ronald Lo Presti: Suite for 5 trumpets
  • Maurice Ravel: Trois Chansons (arranged by Sasha Canter)
  • Archie John: East China Sea, 1992 (UK Premiere)
  • Erik Morales: Cyclone

  The members of the group played a variety of trumpets and flugelhorns, with a great diversity of mutes. All but one member of the group spoke briefly before each piece to introduce it. They played an encore by a Swedish composer whose name I did not catch.

  Mr John was in the audience and spoke briefly before his work was played. This work was very interesting and very nice, with long slow notes and slow, repeated intervals. The music reminded of the 2009 video of slow surf by artist Peter Campus, wave, and this would be good music to watch surf by.

• Dmitri Alexeev, in a solo recital at Leighton House Museum, Holland Park, London, on Tuesday 4 June 2024. This was a superb recital of mostly 19th Century music by a great Russian pianist, who is both a student and a teacher of other great Russian pianists. About 90 people attended, in a room that takes perhaps 100. The opening few works were accompanied by birds outside the building, noisily announcing sundown. At the concert’s conclusion, the audience brought Mr Alexeev back to the stage five times, and he played three encores. The entire programme was played from memory, and comprised:
  • Handel: Suite in D Minor, HWV 437
  • Brahms: Piano Pieces, Op. 76
  • Interval
  • Medtner: 4 Pieces from the cycle “Forgotten Melodies”
  • Wagner/Liszt: Recitative and Romance from “Tannhauser” S444
  • Wagner/Liszt: Pilgrims Chorus from “Tannhauser” S443, No. 1
  • Chopin/Liszt: 5 Polish Songs S480
• Alexander Doronin in a recital at St Margaret’s Church Putney, London, Sunday 2 June 2024. The programme comprised:
  • Domenico Scarlatti: Two Sonatas
  • Elena Firsova: Hymn to Spring, Op. 64 (1993)
  • Robert Schumann: Kreisleriana, Op. 16

  This was an excellent recital on a good Yamaha piano in a church with very good acoustics, to an audience of about 35 people, including some young children and at least one dog. The audience felt like family and friends, and the atmosphere was welcoming and relaxed, with a nice vibe. Mr Doronin’s performance was articulate, lively and forceful.

  The Kreisleriana was exemplary. Perhaps because I once played and listened to lots of Schumann’s music when I was younger, I always find his music develops in ways that feel natural and logical. Apparently, he had schizophrenia and told others that some of his music, such as Kreisleriana, reflected two different sides to his personality – the extroverted and the introverted. But many of us are like this, I think: We need times to be alone and to work in solitude, and other times to visit with and interact with others, and to share our ideas with them. This is especially true of artists and of mathematicians.

  Maybe as a promising portent, on my way to the concert on the Underground, I encountered a group of about eight male singers and a piano accordianista, singing songs in Russian, on the District Line. I asked one of them their name, but he said they had no name, they were “just friends”. Life in London!

• Elias String Quartet with Gary Pomeroy (viola) in the second of four concerts in their series of chamber works by Felix Mendelssohn at Wigmore Hall on Thursday 30 May 2024. The programme comprised (as played – the first two works were reversed from the printed program):
  • String Quartet No. 1 in E-flat, Op. 12 (1829)
  • String Quartet No. 3 in D, Op. 44 No. 1 (1838)
  • String Quintet No. 2 in B-flat, Op. 87 (1845)
• Ian Pace, in a solo recital of 20th Century Russian and Ukrainian piano music at the Performance Space, College Building, City University of London, UK, on Tuesday 28 May 2024. The space had seats laid out for about 60 people, and about half were occupied. Perhaps another 30 seats could have fitted in the room. The programme comprised:
  • Aleksander Skryabin: Piano Sonata No. 4, op. 30 (1903)
  • Arthur Lourié: Deux poèmes, op. 8 (1912)
  • Boris Lyatoshinsky: Three Preludes, op. 38, no. 1 (1942)
  • Sergei Prokofiev: Ten Pieces from Cinderella, op. 97 (1943)
  • INTERVAL
  • Valentin Silvestrov: Piano Sonata No. 2 (1975)
  • Sergei Zagny: Studies 1-3 (1989-1990)
  • Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor (original 1913 version)

  The performance was very good, and of a high virtuoso standard. My only quibble with the performance was that it was suited for an auditorium of 2000 people, not a room of just 30. In other words, it was too loud and forceful, especially in the Rachmaninoff. I have heard other pianists ignore the context of their performance in the exact same manner (playing too forcefully for the size of the room), so perhaps I am in a minority on this question. But why shout at someone what they are perfectly able to hear said to them less loudly?

  The music was all new to me, although much of it not to my taste. Scriabin I have never got, and this Sonata was as confusing and chaotic as most of his music is to me. How it is supposed to lead us to spiritual salvation (as was supposedly Scriabin’s intention) is not something I understand. The works of Lourié and Lyatoshinsky were of their time, modernist in idiom without being distinctive. Prokofiev’s music was instantly recognizable for his spiky melodies, modulations to adjacent keys, and polytonality. After much recent listening to his music, I still find it alien to my thought processes, even that which I have come to greatly like (eg, his Second Piano Concerto).

  The Sonata by Silvestrov required the plucking of strings inside the piano in the low bass, which added some unusual and interesting timbres. Otherwise, the piece sounded like a serialist work, with (as so often in such music) no coherence at first hearing, just single sounds in different registers without even any local relationships (ie, connections to the sounds just heard or about to be heard), and with nothing to provide any global structure sound-wise. We could have heard it played backwards and not felt anything different. Of course, the absence of any warp or weft may be the point of the composition. But then, my sympathies are mostly with downtown music, not uptown serialism.

  The studies by Zagny were soft-sounding and slow, almost Feldmanesque. They included a repeated pattern of several chords, which gave the music considerably more aural coherence than had the Silvestrov work (and more than has most Feldman for that matter). These were the only works in this concert I would seek to hear again. The music of Rachmaninoff I mostly find overbearing and sentimental. I understand why pianists are attracted to the technical challenges of his music, and applaud their skills in playing it, skills Mr Pace showed aplenty here.

• Issac Harari in a graduation recital in the Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall, Royal College of Music, London, 26 May 2024, with playing that was virtuosic. The programme was;
  • Ravel: Alborada del Gracioso from Miroirs (arranged Saffri Duo and Toril Azzalini) (2 marimbas, with Toril Azzalini)
  • Benjamin Finley: Blade (Solo drumkit)
  • Michael Burritt: Caritas, Movement III: Majestic (solo marimba)
  • Isaac Harari: Delirious (along with Ethan Townsend – sax, Josh Mitchell-Rayner – keyboard, Joe Orme – bass guitar, and Lewis Isaacs – drums)

• Pavel Kolesnikov in a solo recital at an almost-full Wigmore Hall, London, 22 May 2024. The theme of the recital was Celestial Navigation, and before he came on stage, there was a short talk by Mr Kolesnikov through the speakers about the idea behind the theme. It was not clear if he was speaking live or this talk had been pre-recorded. (I know how difficult it can be for some musicians to speak before or during playing, as both activities may be using the same hemisphere of the brain.)
  • Louis Couperin (1626-1661): Pavane in F sharp minor
  • Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992): Regard de l’Etoile from Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus (1944)
  • Fryderyk Chopin (1810-1849): Nocturne in D flat Op. 27 No. 2 (1835)
  • Olivier Messiaen: Regard de l’Etoile from Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus
  • Olivier Messiaen: La colombe from Préludes (1928-9)
  • Fryderyk Chopin: Nocturne in E minor Op. 72 No. 1 (c.1829)
  • Olivier Messiaen: La colombe from Préludes Prélude (1964)
  • Fryderyk Chopin: Nocturne in C sharp minor Op. 27 No. 1 (1835)
  • Olivier Messiaen: Prélude
  • Maurice Ravel (1875-1937): Une barque sur l’océan from Miroirs (1904–5)
  • Thomas Adès (b.1971) Darknesse visible (1992)
  • Interval
  • Franz Schubert (1797-1828): 4 Impromptus D935 (1827):
    Impromptu in F minor • Impromptu in A flat • Impromptu in B flat • Impromptu in F minor

  This was a fine and moving performance by Mr Kolesnikov, played (I think) from memory. For the audience, our experience was enhanced by the admirable new policy of The Wigmore to darken the house lights during performances (something standard in British theatre, but not previously common in British music). Mr K played one encore, a moderately long, quiet minimalist work, Etude #2 of Philip Glass. This piece was well chosen, as it had the effect of calming us after the emotional turmoil of the Schubert Impromptus.

  As in his recent performances, the pianist was dressed entirely in white or off-white (in what looked to be designer clothes), which may presage a new trend: Is white the new black? Does it matter what the performer wears? Given that the only lights up were directed to the stage, dressing in white emphasized the performer more than dressing in black would have done. People who hold a traditional view of the performer as merely a slave to the composer (not a view which I hold), would perhaps not approve this emphasis. On the one hand, some would argue, it makes no difference to the sound, and I record it here merely for the historical record. On the other, musicians know that how you think strongly influences how you play, and the feelings and attitude of the performer may be greatly affected by what they are wearing, and by the reasons they have chosen a particular outfit.

• Leopoldo Mugnai in a saxophone recital in the Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall, Royal College of Music, London, 20 May 2024 (accompanied by pianist Anya Fadina and supported by recording engineer Stephen Harrington). This was an exciting recital of 20th and 21st Century music.
  • Graham Fitkin: Gate (1963) (soprano saxophone)
  • Jonathan Harvey: Ricerare una melodia (soprano saxophone and electronics)
  • Alfred Desenclos: Prelude, Cadenza et Finale (soprano saxophone)
  • Andre Waignein: Deux Mouvements (alto saxophone)
  • Ida Gotkovsky: Brillance (alto saxophone).
• Alexander Doronin playing Brahms’ First Piano Concerto with the Sevenoaks Symphony Orchestra under Darrell Davison, in Pamoja Concert Hall, Sevenoaks School, Sevenoaks, UK, 19 May 2024.
  

  This was a superb performance by Mr Doronin, commanding and thrilling, and played from memory. The psychological anguish of the first movement (likely arising from the pain Brahms felt after Schumann’s suicide) and the determination to live on in the main theme of the third were both strongly evident. Mr Doronin’s playing was technically adept, confident and controlled, yet not at all mechanical. This was an artful and emotionally expressive performance, and I was privileged to have heard it.

  Prior to the Brahms, the orchestra played Beethoven’s Egmont Overture and, after the interval, his Eroica Symphony (which I did not catch). The orchestra and conductor are to be congratulated for tackling such an ambitious programme, and for playing with such enthusiasm.

  

  The Pamoja Hall has a very high, peaked wooden roof with ribbed wood cladding on the walls, and the acoustic was very good. This hall is inside a modern building with a very good design, allowing the interval audience to spill outside onto a stepped terrace, which the warm evening encouraged. The hall apparently seats 410 and tonight was about three-quarters full. In the audience was the Mayor of Sevenoaks Town Council, wearing her ceremonial gold neck chain.

  Mr Doronin played the Brahms First Concerto again with Mr Davison, this time with the Croydon Symphony Orchestra, at 4pm on Sunday 20 October 2024.

• Part 1 of the Final Audition of the Young Classical Artists Trust (YCAT) at Wigmore Hall, Thursday 16 May 2024. The performers were
  • Cosima Soulez Lariviere, violin
  • Dianto Reed Quintet
  • James Morley, cello
  • Amiri Harewood, piano.

  The standout performances for me were those by James Morley (who was successful in being chosen as a YCAT Fellow for 2024) and the Dianto Reed Quintet (who were not). Mr Harewood was also successful. Congratulations to the winners and to all the contestants.

  I had attended this concert primarily to hear Mr Morley, and I was not disappointed. His program had a symmetry through time, with an excerpt from a Bach Cello Suite at its centre and works by Britten and Kaija Saariaho on both sides of it. The final piece by Liza Lim he played with two bows. The wooden back of the second bow was used initially, higher up the strings than the first bow, but by mid piece, both bows were being used in the usual manner. Although played very well, I thought the music of this work fairly mundane, with mostly low rumblings of little interest. However, the last third of the piece was transformed when Mr Morley started to sing. His voice sang long, soft, high notes that changed this music into something powerfully ethereal.

  • Benjamin Britten: Cello Suite #1, Op. 72 – Canto Primo
  • Luciano Berio: Les monts sont alles
  • Kaija Saariaho: Sept Papillon – Papillon II
  • JS Bach: Cello Suite no. 6 – Allemande
  • Benjamin Britten: Cello Suite #1, Op. 72 – Fuga
  • Kaija Saariaho: Sept Papillon – Papillon II (reprise)
  • Martin Marais: Les voix humains
  • Liza Kim: Cello Playing – as Meteorology

  The Dianto Reed Quintet were simply outstanding. The members had memorized the music, so were not confined to stand still in place reading the scores. Instead, they could move about to enact the dialectical elements of the story they presented, which was music about and leading to Manuel de Falla’s Danza del Terror from his ballet El Amor Brujo (Love, The Sorcerer). We didn’t just hear the attempted siren song and the counter song that is the final act of the ballet, we saw the musicians enact it by their movements around the stage. The set included a cocktail table and four chairs, and the musicians played variously sitting and standing around the table, or moving elsewhere on the stage. The movements appeared to have been carefully choreographed. I was reminded of the physical enactment of the dialectical interactions in Vivaldi’s The Seasons that I witnessed almost exactly ten years ago by Pekka Kuusisto playing with and leading the Sacconi Quartet and the Chamber Orchestra of the Royal College of Music.

  Identidades: la magia del Duende

  • Primo Ish-Hurwitz: Three Preludes to El Amor Brujo, No. I
  • Manuel de Falla (arranged Arjan Linker): La vida breve – Danza espanola
  • Enrique Granados (arranged Arjan Linker): Doce danzas espanola – Oriental
  • Primo Ish-Hurwitz: Three Preludes to El Amor Brujo, No. II
  • Xoan Montes Capon (arranged Max Knigge): Negra sombra
  • Primo Ish-Hurwitz: Three Preludes to El Amor Brujo, No. III
  • Manuel de Falla (arranged Hugo Bouma): “El amor brujo” Suite – Danza del Terror & Danza Ritual del Fuego

  The quintet comprises five Spanish musicians who studied together in Amsterdam. The theme of their recital was The Duende, the fiery internal spirit that sometimes inspires performers to create great and passionate art. The performers introduced us to Federico Garcia Lorca’s Theory and Play of The Duende and then quoted from it several times. Garcia Lorca posited The Duende as a third member of a trio that includes positive angels and the artist’s muse in inspiring artists: angels are always better than ourselves, while the muse is static. Only the duende is alive and possibly capricious in its intentions.

  The Diantoistas aimed to reveal to us the duende in their recital, and they most certainly did. This performance was passionate and fiery, and among the best half-dozen musical performances I have ever been fortunate to be present at. If you ever wondered, as I have, what present-day England would have been like had the Spanish Armada been successful in their attempted invasion of 1588, then here is part of the answer: Britain would have had musicians like this!

  There is a video of a live performance by the Dianto Reed Quintet of a longer version of the Duende programme here. Rereading this entry reminded me of these words of the Provincial of the British Province of the Society of Jesus about the Latin culture of the Society and its adaption to English culture when founded four centuries ago.

• Tom Zalmanov in a very fine solo piano recital at Steinway Hall, London, Wednesday 15 May 2024. The programme was on the theme of traveling and comprised music from France, Austria, Israel, Russia and Spain:
  • Francis Poulenc: Trois Novelettes
  • Franz Schubert: Wanderer Fantasy in C major, Op. 15 D760
  • Tal-Haim Samnon: Memory and Variations
  • Sergei Rachmaninov: Preludes Op. 23 – No. 3 in D minor, No. 4 in D major, No. 5 in G minor
  • Ferruccio Busoni: Kammer-Fantasie uber Carmen, BV284.

  Mr Zalmanov’s teacher Professor Ian Fountain of the Royal Academy of Music was in the audience, as was pianist Murray Perahia. A review of the recital by the indefatigable Christopher Axworthy is here.

• French pianist Cedric Tiberghien in a recital of that interleaved Ligeti’s Ricercata, Kortag and different variations of Beethoven, at The Wigmore Hall, Sunday 5 May 2024 (his 39th birthday). This was a further episode in CT’s exploration of variation form.
  

  • György Ligeti (1923-2006): Musica ricercata No. 1 (1951-3)
  • Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827): 6 Variations on a Swiss Song WoO. 64 (1790)
  • György Ligeti: Musica ricercata No. 2
  • Ludwig van Beethoven: 12 Variations on the Russian Dance from Wranitzky’s ballet Das Waldmädchen in A WoO. 71 (1796-7)
  • György Kurtág (b.1926): Fleurs nous sommes from Játékok (1973)
  • György Ligeti: Musica ricercata No. 3 • Musica ricercata No. 4 •
    Musica ricercata No. 5
  • Ludwig van Beethoven: 8 Variations on the Romance ‘Un fièvre brûlante’ from Grétry’s Richard Coeur-de-lion in C WoO. 72 (1795)
  • Interval
  • György Ligeti: Musica ricercata No. 6
  • Ludwig van Beethoven: 13 Variations on the arietta ‘Es war einmal ein alter Mann’ by Dittersdorf in A WoO. 66
  • György Kurtág: Flowers we are (In memoriam Árpád Illés) from Játékok (pub. 1997)
    …et encore une fois: fleurs nous sommes… from Játékok (1973)
  • György Ligeti: Musica ricercata No.7
  • Ludwig van Beethoven: 10 Variations on the Duet ‘La stessa la stessissima’ from Salieri’s Falstaff in B flat WoO. 73 (1799)
  • György Ligeti: Musica ricercata No. 8 • Musica ricercata No. 9
    Musica ricercata No. 10 • Musica ricercata No. 11
  • Johann Sebastian Bach: (1685-1750) Aria variata BWV989 (by 1717)

• The Southbank Sinfonia at St John’s Church, Waterloo, London on Wednesday 1 May 2024, in a program that featured the first Symphony of Louis Farrenc.

  The first movement of Madame Farrenc’s Symphony creates a sound world that is Mendelssohnian, while the last movement has all the thills of a Sturm-und-Drang symphony of Johann Vanhal.

• The RCM Symphony Orchestra with Thomas Kelly as piano soloist, performing Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony, at the Royal Festival Hall, London, 1 May 2024. This was a very good performance, even though the music itself is just awful – bombastic, long-winded, pointless, otiose – like much of Messiaen’s music. It is no surprise to me to learn that Leonard Bernstein, after conducting the first ever performance, never performed this work again. How badly it compares with Bernstein’s own orchestral music.
  

  About 15 minutes into the performance, an elderly man not far from where I was sitting apparently collapsed and so we nearby were distracted for about ten minutes. The orchestra, if they noticed at all, played on. Full credit to the people nearest to him for helping him and to the emergency crew who assisted him to his feet and out quietly. I hope he recovered well.

• The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, under Andras Schiff, playing the five symphonies of Mendelssohn, along with his violin concerto and his two numbered piano concertos, in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, over three nights 24, 25 and 26 April 2024. The soloists were Andras Schiff and Alina Ibragimova. These were three outstanding concerts, with absolutely superb performances from both soloists and from the orchestra.
  

  I noticed that when he conducted Maestro Schiff rarely gave the beat. He did not use a baton, and his hands and arms gave the phrasing he wanted. He normally turned his body to face whichever group or instrumentalist had his attention, which gave a visual indication to the audience of the polyphonic and dialogical aspects of this fine music.

  It was also very nice to see Ms Ibragimova sitting in the audience to listen to the orchestra after her solo in the final concert.

• A performance I wish I could have attended, but which I only knew about later (Thankyou, AD): Ukrainian pianist Vadym Kholodenko at the Southbank Centre, London, on Sunday afternoon 14 April 2024, playing a piano transcription of Mozart’s Requiem and Rzewski’s “the people united . . .”. Only pianists who can whistle can perform all these variations. A video recording of the Rzewski is here.
  

  Pianist and writer Jeremy Chan has a review of this recital at his website.

• Juan Perez Floristan, piano recital at Wigmore Hall, Thursday 11 April 2024. The program was:
  • Ligeti: Musica ricercata (1951-3)
  • Alberto Ginastera: Danzas argentinas, Op. 2 (1937)
  • Musorgsky: Pictures from an Exhibition (1874)

  For an encore, Mr Floristan played one of Schubert’s Moment Musicaux. The hall was about three-quarters full. This was a powerful and emotional recital, with very fine playing, especially in the Musorgsky. The dances by Ginastera were short with a variety of moods and emotions; they would each make a fine encore piece.

• Elias String Quartet in the first of 4 concerts of the String Quartets of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, Wigmore Hall, Sunday 7 April 2024.
  • Felix Mendelssohn: Four Pieces for String Quartet, Op. 81 Posth. (1847, 1847, 1843 and 1827)
  • Fanny Mendelssohn: String Quartet in E Flat (1834)
  • Felix Mendelssohn: String Quartet No. 6 in F Minor, Op. 80 (1847)

• Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment: Bach’s Easter Oratorio and two cantatas at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank, London, Wednesday 27 March 2024.
  • Erfreut euch, ihr Herzen (Rejoice, you hearts), BWV 66
  • Bleib bei uns, denn es will Abend werden (Stay with us, for evening falls) BWV 6
  • Oster-Oratorium, BWV 249

• Libby Burgess playing 8 of the 48 – Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues – in Concert 1 of 6 at Temple Church, at 9am on Tuesday 26 March 2023. This is part of a series aiming to play the WTC in each of the 48 counties of England. Today’s county is the City of London. About 40 people present heard the following preludes and fugues:
  Book I in C major
  Book I in G minor
  Book I in c minor
  Book II in Eb major
  Book II in D# minor
  Book I in Bb minor
  Book I in Bb major
  Book II in G Major

  The long reverberation of this church was not great for the sound of a piano, in my opinion.Very fine playing, although not all interpretations were to my taste. For instance, Ms Burgess strongly emphasized the melody notes in the proto-minimalist Prelude in C minor in Book I.

• Astral Saxophone Quartet playing by “candlelight” at St Mary-Le-Strand, Friday 22 March 2024. The quartet comprises musicians from the Royal College of Music: Leopoldo Mugnai, Oliver Lee, Annabella Chenevix Trench and Ethan Townsend. The program comprised:
  • Singole: Premier Quatour
  • Gershwin, arr. Wendell Hobbs: Gershwin Classics
  • Rod A Moulds, arr. Nigel Wood: Three Russian Songs
  • JS Bach, arr. Oliver Lee: Ricercar a3
  • Grieg: Holberg Suite Op. 40, Mvt 4, Air
  • Rivier: Grave et Presto
  • Bernstein: West Side Story Selection

  The playing was superb, and much tighter than the previous time I heard this quartet (on 25 June 2023). (Image credit: Astral Quartet.)

  

• Lucas Jussen and Arthur Jussen with the London Philharmonia Orchestra, under Eun Sun Kim at the Royal Festival Hall, London, Thursday 21 March 2024. The program was:
  • Texu Kim: Spin-Flip
  • Mozart: Concerto in E-flat for Two Pianos, K365
  • Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5

  A wonderful and uplifting concert. I had a seat in the front row opposite LJ which was ideal for the Mozart. This was not such a good seat for the Tchaikovsky, as the strings blocked the sound of the instruments behind them. The opening work by Texu Kim was exciting and enjoyable.

  A review of two previous performances by the Jussens is here.

• Pavel Kolesnikov and Samson Tsoy in a 4-hands 1-piano recital to a fully-packed Wigmore Hall, London, 14 March 2024. The music included:
  • Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (4-hands) (1911-1913)
  • Lyonya Desyatnikov: Trompe-l’oeil (2023)
  • Schubert: Fantasie in F Minor D940 (1828)

  This was an outstanding concert, which I was very fortunate to hear. The Rite was immensely moving, as always.

  The piece by Russian composer Lyonya Desyatnikov was a commission in 2023 for these two pianists by the Aldeburgh Festival, and was a re-interpretation of the Schubert piece. In introducing the work, Mr Kolesnikov made reference to the wonderful short story by Jorge Luis Borges in which a modern author revises Cervantes’Don Quixote for the modern day. Although the rewritten text has exactly the same words in exactly the same order as the original version, the new version is now informed by all that has been written in the time since the original publication. It is now a very different work.

  Desyatnikov’s work is not all the same notes of Schubert’s Fantasie, nor are they all in the same order. But it is a reworking of many of the musical ideas of the Schubert. Indeed, in so far as the Schubert contains sudden changes of mood and temper, Desyatnikov’s work emphasizes this aspect even more, so his piece felt like an attempt to capture the essence of the Schubert. Both works were played immensely skillfully.

  There were two encores, the second a Bach chorale.

  I am pleased the performers are both happy to break staid convention in their clothes, although the multiple layers they each wore would not, I think, have been that comfortable to perform in.

  (Thankyou to GM and AD for fascinating conversations this evening. I am also grateful to AD for first introducing me to the powerful music of Desyatnikov.)

• Mikhail Bouzine in a superb recital that felt like a happening, at the Steinway Hall, London, 13 March 2024, to a packed audience of about 40 people. The event was entitled “The Happier Eden” and included a great variety of works, all relating to love, particularly to love of oneself. The program and the notes of the shoeless performer are shown in the photographs here.
  
  
  

  The concert began with Mirror by Fluxus artist George Brecht, in which Mr Bouzine walked in front of the audience holding up a large mirror for the audience to see ourselves: a good start to a program mentioning Narcissus. I have long admired the subversive whimsy of Brecht, as I mentioned here, and this work was in that spirit. The theme throughout the evening was love, and so we heard Dimitri Mitropoulos’ Beatrice, and the swooniest rendition of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 16 in G major I have ever heard. Here was a composer – and a performer – who had been in love.

  Cornelius Cardew’s Memories of you involved Mr Bouzine making various sounds, for example, dropping a biro on the floor, swirling the biro around a coffee mug, and playing two brief recordings from a phone placed inside the end of the piano. I imagine these were personal memories of someone dear to the performer.

  Dear to me is my late and greatly-missed friend, French composer Christophe Bertrand. I was therefore delighted by the inclusion of his beautiful piano work Haiku. In the context of this program, the sounds of this work were those of a babbling brook, water flowing gently over stones, as Narcissus looked at his own image in the water.

  This was a brave and intelligent program played forcefully and with the strong emotions that passionate love entails. The evening was enchanting, and I was privileged to attend.

  Christopher Axworthy’s photos and review of the happening are here.

  Postscript (added 2024-03-23): Following the concert, I purchased the score for Cardew’s work (published by Universal Edition 1967), and it comprises an interesting graphical score along with textual instructions. The performer is free to choose various objects to make sounds, and must make some sounds in a certain order, according to threads in the graphic. The sounds must also be made at certain places around the piano. Where threads of actions for two object intersect, both objects must be used to make the sound.

  I was reminded of the exhaustive typology of ways of combining actions that computer science, the theory and application of delegation, has identified, as I describe here. Against this typology, Cardew only permits sequential and some parallel combinations of sounds, although there is some choice of sounds (the performer may choose any objects) and choice in the order of actions for some threads.

• Jonathan Ferrucci playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations at King’s Place, London, 11 March 2024. This was a superb performance, to a packed hall. Mr Ferrucci’s playing was warm and spirited, and not in any way austere, as performances of Bach sometimes are.
  

  At the very end, Mr Ferrucci kept his hands on the keys and his feet on the pedals for many seconds after he finished playing, which thankfully stayed the applause. I was pleased that he gave no encore, and spoke no word the entire evening, so that the sounds in our minds at the end were those of Bach. He had presented us Bach’s music, all of which was wonderful, and only the music, nothing else. I was elated for some time afterwards, as the recipients of my many late-night messages that evening can attest.

• Frank Dupree and the Philharmonia Orchestra, London, under Santtu-Matias Rouvaki in a concert of Russian music, Royal Festival Hall, London Thursday 7 March 2024. The program comprised:
  • Glinka: Capriccio Brilliante (Spanish Overture #1)
  • Kapustin: Piano Concerto #5 (UK Premiere)
  • Borodin: Symphony #2
  • Rimsky-Korsakov: Capriccio Espagnol

  I attended in order to hear Kapustin’s concerto, not any of which I have heard before. The performance of Mr Dupree and the Philharmonia was very good. I was not so pleased by the music, though. The concerto is written in a jazz style – or rather, many jazz styles, all very populist. It struck me as the composer showing off his knowledge of different jazz sub-styles, and I could not hear any overall coherence or structure, or development (at least, not on a single hearing).

  Mr Dupree was called back for an encore, and his encore piece was much more impressive than the concerto. He arranged for 6 percussionists (including the conductor) and a double-bass player to join him, and together they played a version of “Caravan”. Dupree started by plucking the strings on the piano until the other players were around him, then played the piano, and at one point turned around to face the others and switched to playing bongos, then back to the piano. The encore was much more exciting than the concerto, and Dupree seemed to be more excited by it. People now gave him a standing ovation (which they had not done before).

  There is a video of most of the encore here.

  Having people to meet, places to be, instruments to practice, I could not stay for the second half. An earlier post about different arrangements of Caravan is here.

• Alessio Bax and Southbank Sinfonia, under Simon Over, in a Rush Hour concert at St John’s Church, Waterloo, London, Wednesday 6 March 2024. The program comprised:
  • Dvorak: String Quartet #12, Op 96, (“American”), First Movement, performed by student musicians from Guernsey: Matthew Moody, Charlie Dunford, Ben Davidson and Molly Robinson
  • Toby Young: Sing Each Song Twice, performed by Berkeley Ensemble
  • Mozart: Clarinet Quintet in A, K.581, Second Movement, performed by Berkeley Ensemble
  • Grieg: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op 16.

  The concert was dedicated with thanks to two of the orchestra’s founders, Michael Berman and Katherine Verney. The Berkeley Ensemble comprises alumni of the orchestra from previous cohorts. A fine concert to a packed church. The absence of a stage in this venue means that sitting in the front row of the audience is very much like sitting inside the orchestra. In my opinion, this proximity is a feature not a bug.

• Lucilla Rose Mariotti: Echoes of Finland: Sibelius in Sight and Sound. Junior Fellow Showcase, Performance Hall, Royal College of Music, London, 4 March 2024. Performers were: Lucilla Rose Mariotti (violin), Anna Crawford (cello), and Alexander Doronin (piano).
  

  (Image credit: Lucilla Rose Mariotti)

  The concert was an all-Sibelius program:

  • Piano Trio #4 in C Major, JS 208, (Lovisa Trio)
  • Vesipisaroita (Water Droplets), JS 216
  • Piano Trio in D Major, JS 209 (Korpo Trio)

  This was a fine multi-media performance of some early Sibelius, music that was, in the accurate words of a musician friend, “very genuine but rather still naive music”. To acknowledge the synaesthesia of Sibelius, the performance was accompanied by meditative videos of streams and lakes. The middle piece was for pizzicato strings, and was accompanied by a video of rain falling gently on water.

• Jan Lisiecki in an exceptional piano recital on the theme of Preludes, in Cambridge, UK, 26 February 2024. I wrote about it here.
• Southbank Sinfonia at St John’s Church Waterloo, Wednesday 21 February 2024. This ensemble comprises newly-graduated musicians in their first foray into professional orchestral performance, so the line-up changes completely each year. The program comprised:
  • Sergei Prokofiev: Symphony #1 (Classical), Op 25
  • Sally Beamish: Hover
  • WA Mozart: Symphony #41 (Jupiter).

  This was a most joyous concert, and finely played. Because all seats in the orchestra were occupied by the performers, I sat as close as I possibly could, in the front row.

  Despite hearing Prokofiev’s first symphony many times, the tonal spikiness of many of his melodies and their surprising developments I still find somewhat alien to my thinking. I also find it remarkable that he wrote this work while his home city was undergoing revolution; I hear no trace of that in the music.

  Hover by Sally Beamish (who was in the audience) was new to me and very pleasant. The work centres on an oboe solo, intended to represent a hovering kestrel, playing a melody which then moves around the orchestra. Much of the sound world created is very low volume, which sometimes made it hard to distinguish the music from the low rumblings of nearby underground trains. It would be an interesting task for a composer to incorporate low train sounds into a site-specific composition.

  The performance of the Jupiter was also excellent. This symphony never fails to lift my spirits: the final movement contains the greatest fugue written by anyone in the 75 years between the death of Bach and the composition of Mendelssohn’s Octet.

• Matan Porat in a lunch-time recital at St Martin-in-the-Fields Church, London, Friday 16 February 2024. The church was about 3/4 full. The program was mostly Bach:
  • Bach/Liszt: Prelude and Fugue in A Minor BWV543
  • Bach/Porat: Chorale Prelude: Kommst Du nun, von Himmel herunter auf Erden BWV650
  • Bach/Feinberg: Chorale Prelude: Were nun denj lieben Gott BWV647
  • Bach/Kurtag: Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit BWV106
  • Bach/Busoni: Chorale Prelude: Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein BWV734
  • Brahms/Busoni: 3 Chorale Preludes Op 122: Herzlich tut mich erfreuen; Es ist ein Ros entsprungen; Herzlich tut mich verlangen
  • Bach/Feinberg: Largo from Sonata for Organ in C Major BWV529
  • Bach/Porat: Chaconne from Partita for violin in d minor BWV1004.

  Mr Porat’s playing was very good, and the Chaconne was close to sublime. The audience called him back several times, and he played at least one encore. But I wanted to leave with the Chaconne in my head, so did not stay for the encores.

• I was most fortunate this past week (7-13 February 2024) to hear live-streamed several of the recitals performed as part of the 18th European Piano Competition in Bremen, Germany. The final round comprised wonderful performances of Beethoven’s 5th Piano Concerto (Viktor Soos), 4th Piano Concerto (Alexander Doronin) and 3rd Piano Concerto (Théotime Gillot), each playing with the Bremer Philharmoniker under Tung-Chieh Chuang. The EKW 2024 website currently still has recordings of all the performances.
  

  Congratulations to the prize-winners and to all the participants.

  • Théotime Gillot – 1st prize
  • Viktor Soos – 2nd prize
  • Alexander Doronin – 3rd prize
  • Théotime Gillot – Audience Award
  • Théotime Gillot – Prize for the youngest person taking part in the semi-final
  • Lukas Katter – Siegrid Ernst-Prize for the best interpretation of a piece composed by a female composer (Lili Boulanger)

• Kasparas Mikužis and the Academy Symphony Orchestra under John Wilson at a packed Duke’s Hall, the Royal Academy of Music, London, 9 February 2024, playing the Second Piano Concerto of Rachmaninoff.
  

  I have been many times to hear performances at Duke’s Hall, and the acoustics in the main hall are excellent. For the first time, I was seated in the Rear Balcony, in the nose-bleed seats. The acoustics here too were very good, except that the orchestra tended to drown out the piano in the louder sections when both were playing. Perhaps this was not the case in the main hall, as the piano would have projected sound straight out to the audience, in front of the orchestra. But the back half of the orchestra, the brass and percussion, seemed to project up rather than straight out, to the detriment of the piano sound for those of us seated high up. This is a small quibble about a very fine performance, and probably not easily fixed without some changes to the hall.

  It is very difficult to hear this concerto afresh, after so many adaptations and allusions to it by Hollywood. The melodies and even the orchestrations are so familiar to most of us that any performance risks being heard, not as a single work of coherent musical form, but as a medley of famous tunes by Rachmaninoff: first one well-known tune, then another, as if his greatest hits had been collected together and re-written for the Boston Pops orchestra.

  This performance managed to overcome that risk and convey a coherent sense of the form of the work. This was despite the fact that, like all late romantic music, the composer is doing his best to hide the form. I am not a fan of late romantic music, for precisely this reason – I want to be able to hear the musical form and structure, as I listen. This was an excellent performance. Mr Mikužis was confident and assured, and his playing, as always, was superb. The orchestra, too was excellent. This was certainly a performance for the ages, and I was very privileged to hear it.

  RAM have posted a video of the performance on their Youtube channel, here.

• Mendelsson: Elijah, at the Barbican, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Chorus and the Guildhall Singers under Antonio Pappano (sung in English), 31 January 2024. This was an outstanding performance to a fully-packed hall, marred only by the noise of half-a-dozen latecomers still arriving during the overture.
  

  Interestingly, the double basses and cellos were placed on the conductor’s left-hand side, on the opposite side from the male (tenor and bass) singers in the choirs. The first violins were at the front left and the second violins at the front right, with the violas further from the stage behind them on the right. The timpanist and organist were on the right behind the strings and beneath the brass. The brass and woodwinds were seated on elevated platforms, with the French horns on the left, the woodwinds in the middle, and the brass on the right.

  The orchestral overture of Elijah is one of the greatest representations of gradually-increasing tension in all of music, and this performance showed that superbly.

• Imogen Cooper, Giulia Contaldo and Kasparas Mikužis – Piano recital at Famington Farm, Barcheston, Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire CV36 5AX, 28 January 2024. The program comprised:
  • Cooper: Bach/Kempff: Chorale BWV 307/734 “Nun freuf euch, lieben Christen g’mein”
  • Cooper: Bach/Busoni: Chorale BWV 659 “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland”
  • Contaldo: Respighi: Notturno
  • Contaldo: Wagner/Liszt: Isolde’s Liebestod aus Tristan und Isolde, S.447
  • Contaldo: Debussy: Estampes (Pagodes, La soiree dans Grenade, Jardins sous la pluie)
  • Cooper: Schubert: Impromptus D899 No 1: Allegro Molto Moderato in C minor
  • Mikužis: Chopin – A Selection of Preludes Op 28 (numbers 1-18, 23, 24)

  This was a concert performance after several days of masterclasses, both held in the quiet setting of a farm in Warwickshire. About 50 people attended, in a private concert hall between farm-house and stable, with a very fine piano in a room with good acoustics.

  All three pianists played superbly well. Ms Cooper, a renowned pianist I had not heard play before, started by presenting us a very romantic treatment of two Bach chorales. These were wonderful. Ms Contaldo played her selection very well, with Respighi’s Notturno new to me. I much prefer French impressionists to late Romantics, so could have done with more Debussy, and less Wagner/Liszt. I have now heard Mr Mikužis play Chopin’s Op. 28 Preludes three times (well, strictly speaking, 2.83 times, as this third performance was incomplete). Again his performance was superb, and sounded yet more confident than the time before. The piano may have helped his performance sound more assured.

• Kasparas Mikužis: Solo Piano Recital at Regent Hall (Salvation Army), Oxford Street, London, UK, Friday 12 January 2024. The program comprised:
  • Alvidas Remesa – Stigmatas – 5 miniatures for piano
  • Chopin – 24 Preludes Op 28

  An excellent performance before about 65 people on a good piano on a raised stage in a hall with a very clear and direct acoustic.

  As befits a recital in a hall used for religious meetings, the program comprised entirely spiritual music. Remesa’s Stigmatas are beautiful and reflective miniatures, and were new to me. They are a real find. This was the second play-through of Chopin’s Op. 28 Preludes I have heard from Mr Mikužis in the last week, and this second time, he seemed to have gained in confidence. The piano and the acoustics no doubt helped to convey the force of his playing. Mr Mikužis played with strength and verve, and with great sensitivity. One difference that was apparent in this second performance, was that the three low D notes of a tolling bell that end the final prelude, Mr Mikužis seemed to play more forcefully than he had last weekend: Raging, raging against the dying of the light, not meekly reconciling oneself to death. This was a very moving performance.

  One view of Chopin’s Preludes is that they are intended to lead us to think about our death and the after-life. Certainly, Chopin repeatedly uses the medieval Dies Irae Gregorian chant from the Catholic Requiem service throughout the collection, and several of the preludes use tempi and rhythmic patterns associated with funeral marches (eg, Number 20 in C minor). Listening to them again, I was reminded of Hokusai’s 36 Views of Mount Fuji: We are being shown the same event (death in the case of Chopin) from different positions or perspectives.

• Kasparas Mikužis: Solo Piano Recital at St Mary’s of Charity Church, Faversham, UK, 6 January 2024. The programme was:
  • Mikalojus Čiurlionis: Three Preludes (I think)
  • Chopin: Preludes, Op. 28.

  About 50 people were present on a cold Saturday morning to hear this wonderful recital, in a large church with a clear, bright acoustic. The opening three pieces by Čiurlionis were delightful impressionist miniatures. I did not know the programme in advance, so I was delighted to hear Chopin’s Prelude cycle. This was a superb performance, and the audience gave Mr Mikužis a standing ovation. Afterwards, I overheard an audience member remark with amazement how he had produced the force and colours of a full orchestra from just a piano!

  A bell outside at another church could be heard tolling during Prelude No. 6 (in B minor), prefiguring the sombre tolling bell with its three bass notes which ends the final prelude.

  I am most grateful to Mr Mikužis for first introducing me to this Op. 28 cycle of Preludes.