Boulezian, Mark Berry

Dedicated to the memory of Alfred Brendel, whose death had been announced earlier that day, this latest instalment in Tim Horton’s Wigmore Hall Chopin series offered a programme which Brendel might not have given but of which he would surely have approved. It opened with Schumann’s early F-sharp minor sonata, described in Jim Samson’s excellent programme note as ‘immensely challenging’… Horton… gave a commanding account, properly ‘orchestral’, though unquestionably written for the instrument to hand. The strange ‘Introduzione’ to the first movement, turbulent yet controlled, was given with a sort of tragic dignity that already spoke of affinity with Chopin, as did more ruminative passages later on. Schumann’s unusual conception of sonata form here was given its due: communicated rather than ‘explained’. The ‘Aria’ came initially as Eusebian relief, soon complicated to an almost Brahmsian degree: all over far too quickly, leaving one longing for more. Infectious energy characterised the scherzo, duly balanced by its trio, prior to quasi-Beethovenian struggle in a finale whose range of colour could not help but impress, the ascent to final climax finely prepared and achieved.

I suspect I may have been in a minority in the audience in finding Stockhausen’s Klavierstück VII less challenging; yet perhaps not, given Horton’s vividly communicative, comprehending performance. It captured both what (as with almost any piece) is ‘of its time’ and what has enabled it to endure as key work in the piano literature.

“Attack, duration, all parameters were inextricably connected in a ravishing poetic vision of piano resonance and overtones. One could not help but listen in a different, moment-oriented way; one likewise could not help but be rewarded for doing so.”

The second half was given over to Chopin. The pair of op.27 Nocturnes complemented each other beautifully, independence of hands explored in different ways in both. Both were finely shaped, evidently conceived in single, long, ever-varying breaths. Telling rubato made its point without distracting. Both sounded as miniature tone poems: surely what they are. The three op.59 Mazurkas worked equally well as a set and as individual pieces, a fine lilt to the first ushering them on their way. What rhythmic and harmonic subtleties there are here, and what subtle yet unmistakeable pride, which latter quality also helped usher in the Third Piano Sonata. The first movement’s originality may be less startling than that of its counterpart in the Second Sonata, but it was nonetheless palpable in a performance that unfolded with all the time in the world: certainly not slow, yet equally neither hurried nor harried. Will-o’-the-wisp fluttering of the scherzo, turned on its head in the trio, prepared us more in contrast than kinship for the darkness that born in harmony and harmonic rhythm for the slow movement.

“The fantasia-like quality Horton brought to the finale both surprised and crowned, in a sense presaging similar qualities in the encore, the F-sharp major Nocturne, op.15 no.2, whose tonality also connected us to the close of the Schumann sonata. I look forward to the continuation of this fascinating series.”

The Strad, Edward Bhesania

This instalment of the Wigmore Hall’s Sunday-morning concerts was further proof that the informality of the hour at this venue has no ill effect on the sheer quality of its artists.

The woody sound of Rosefield’s instrument lent a keen edge to the opening of Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata, tempering what might otherwise have seemed a carefree mood. Her instinct for colouring was on display throughout the first movement – in the veiled tone of the accompaniment to the piano’s second theme as much as in the stark ghoulishness of the coda. Sparks flew in the whirligigging second movement, in which Rosefield approached the perilous seesawing arpeggios in harmonics with brave abandon. The finale saw an ideal balance of mischief and menace.

Both players addressed the audience in short introductions, Rosefield noting that this day marked Passover as well as Palm Sunday. This made the second item, the Cello Sonata no.2 by (Jewish-born) Mendelssohn, an appropriate pairing to Shostakovich, who openly opposed anti-Semitism.

“In contrast to the Shostakovich, what struck here was the joyful exuberance of both players – the brilliance, precision and tireless energy.”

The encore, Casals’ Song of the Birds, displayed another dimension to Rosefield’s sound: there was nostalgia and melancholy, but a vein of rich lyricism too.

Bachtrack, Phil Parker
Four Stars

If anyone in the audience believed the fiction that playing the piano is the genteel activity beloved of melancholy heroines of 19th-century novels, then 90 minutes in the company of resident Sheffield pianist Tim Horton and guest Ivana Gavrić would surely be enough to dispel that misconception for ever.

“This was piano playing at its most brutal and visceral, and I hasten to add that I mean that in the most complimentary way.”

Stravinsky’s own two-piano arrangement of his ballet The Rite of Spring attempts the almost impossible – to condense the richly textured sound world of a huge symphony orchestra into the essentially monochrome palette of the piano keyboard – but what is lost in orchestral texture is more than compensated for in its focus on The Rite’s principal mode of operation: rhythm.

“Horton and Gavrić, enabled by the Crucible Playhouse’s enclosed, in-the-round intimacy, made us feel the work’s hammer blows, its primal ferocity, as though absorbed by our very bodies. Not that the performance was all sound and fury: the yearning bassoon solo at the start and the quivering flute melodies of the work’s second movement sang hauntingly in their keyboard guise. “

 But what lingered long after the final decisive chord had been struck was the sense of having witnessed something being almost savagely reborn: outside, the icy streets of sub-zero Sheffield, but inside, the violent cracking of the sudden onrush of the Russian spring. As Horton and Gavrić shared a warm (possibly rather exhausted) embrace, the foot-stamping of the audience told its own story.

…The works by Shostakovich and Rachmaninov in the first half of the programme were delivered with the same commitment, even if they are clearly worlds apart in their musical language.

Rachmaninov’s Suite no.1 (“Fantaisie-Tableaux”) is the work of a teenager, but one with almost full access to the rhetorical tricks of the adult composer he would become. The mature Rachmaninov’s fingerprints are everywhere here: rising and falling triplet figures, arpeggiated chords, the relentless ostinati that drove the more exultant sections of the piece with an almost motoric energy… the performers clearly love the music, and their engagement with it was compelling, in the lachrymose third movement as much as in the ringing finale.

In some ways Shostakovich’s Concertino in A minor felt like the odd man out here, depicting not so much renewal as relief, at having survived the Stalin years more or less intact… Horton and Gavrić balanced its brittle humour with the shadow of something far more sombre.

Photo Credit: Matthew Johnson

Boulezian, Mark Berry

With this recital of Debussy and Chopin, Tim Horton opened a Wigmore Hall series in which he will present various works by Chopin with music that influenced him and on which he in turn came to influence. It would always be a fitting thing to do, so long as well done, yet somehow it seems all the more so as the musical world continues to mourn the loss of Maurizio Pollini. ‘At seven,’ Horton writes in an intelligent, engaging introduction to the series, ‘my parents bought me Maurizio Pollini’s astonishing account of the Études. I could not believe that the piano could be played, or written for, like this. My obsession with music, the piano, and Chopin has lasted to this day.’ Indeed, with a series encompassing Bach, Mozart, Schumann, Debussy, Ravel, Szymanowski and Stockhausen, Pollini’s ghost might seem more than usually apparent. Once, he spoke of recording Gaspard de la nuit – imagine! – and Szymanowski was said to be a composer he played in private, though never, I think, in public. The others, Chopin too, featured alongside other composers in the five-concert Royal Festival Hall Pollini Project of 2011.

“Yet this recital in no sense imitated, nor even evidently paid homage: it announced a major voice in its own right, one with interesting and instructive things to say about and with this music, which I hope to follow in subsequent instalments.”

Debussy came first, in the guise of the second book of Préludes, whose sense of a whole, tonal centres notwithstanding, was uncommonly apparent, as if the heir to an early keyboard suite. ‘Brouillards’ announced a number of oppositions and relationships that would persist and transform throughout the set and arguably the recital as a whole.

“Melting and muscular, the performance showed that atmosphere and precision were far from opposed, but rather mutually dependent.”

Clarity of thought was paramount and rightly so. Harmonic rhythm and rhythm more generally, sprung yet with telling rubato, played a guiding role in ‘Feuilles mortes’. ‘La puerta del Vino’ intrigued: darker and more dangerous than I recalled, at times verging on the brutal, yet certainly not without charm. Escamillo turned ‘impressionist’, one might say, not unlike the later ‘Général Lavine – eccentric’. There was likewise nothing fey to the fairies in ‘Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses’. Their light shone brought and colourful rather than flickering. I liked the way Horton’s performance of ‘Bruyères’ drew us in to greater intimacy at its heart, again without sacrifice to colour.

…

Hearing Chopin’s twenty-four Preludes after the interval retrospectively brought influence and affinity to bear on our experience. Again, there was great clarity throughout, not only in presentation of the notes but in demonstrating why they were where they were and how. In general, they were possessed with singularity of idea, not so very different from some of the Etudes, whether in the lightly worn yet expressive virtuosity of one sequence of minor-key pieces, or the sadness of some of its predecessors (E minor and B minor, for instance, the latter sharing elements of character with some of the sadder Mazurkas). Expressive qualities arose from the material rather than being imposed on it, the tumult of the E-flat minor Prelude seeming to be summoned by the piano keys themselves. The serene charm of the ‘Raindrop’, in D-flat, and its A-flat companion had them emerge as miniature tone poems, as with all the pieces heard and expressed as if in a single, variegated breath. The simple nobility of the C minor Prelude, movingly shaded, contrasted with an almost Brahmsian, dark-hued passion to the next-but-one in G minor, which in turn immediately contrasted with a leggiero F major, and finally Romantic turbulence and aristocratic pride in D minor.

“As in all the finest accounts of this book, Pollini’s included, tonal and expressive journeys were as one.”

The Spectator, Richard Bratby

Geoff Brown, The Times
Four Stars

Written a century and more later, the music composed by Huw Watkins is far more concise (the 2012 Piano Quartet takes eight and a half minutes). Form, rhythm, and harmony? As expected, more complex. Yet Watkins never completely ditches tradition, and his material and textures remain fresh and ingenious whatever the instrumental forces.

“I’d single out for special praise the pungent account of his Little Symphony (Orchestra Nova conducted by George Vass)… But every track brings satisfaction.”

Phil Parker, BachTrack
*****

… the performances were a triumph for all concerned.

… Performances [of Prokofiev’s Cello Sonata] are few and far between – pianist Tim Horton, in his almost 20 years with this ensemble, has turned his hand to a huge range of repertoire, but he pointed out beforehand that this was the first time he’d ever played the work. The sonata gripped from its first bars …

“… the cheers that greeted the close of the piece were well deserved”.

… Horton conjured vivid colours from the instrument as [Rachmianinov’s Piano Trio no. 1 in G minor] shifted between elegiac and more spirited moods before settling into something sombrely funereal at the close.

… Ensemble 360’s string players have a real love for Tchaikovsky’s quartets, something Nabarro expounded on before the work began, and it’s certainly the case that the second quartet needs passionate investment on the part of its performers. Special mention should go to Claudia Ajmone-Marsan on second violin and Rachel Roberts on viola, sawing away at their semiquavers almost throughout with barely any moment in the limelight, but contributing to the quartet’s rich, dense texture, the result sounding full but never cluttered.

“The first violin takes the principal role in the drama and Nabarro shone here. There was a touch of the gypsy violin to his playing, glimpses of portamento in his handling of the string line in the outer movements in particular.”

… If the soulful Andante ma non tanto touched something of the world-weariness of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, the exhilarating release of the folksy finale ensured much foot-stomping and cheering at the close.