This post is one in a sequence which lists live music I have heard, as best my memory allows, from the Pandemic onwards. I will update this as time permits. In some cases, I am also motivated to write about what I heard.
Other posts in this collection can be found 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 performance, which I was very fortunate to hear. The piece by Russian composer Lyonya Desyatnikov was a commission in 2023 for these two pianists by the Aldeburgh Festival. 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. (Thanks also to GM and AD for fascinating conversations this evening. I am grateful to AD for recently 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, 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.
Christopher Axworthy’s review and photos of the happening are here.
- 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).
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.