ArtMuse, Karine Hetherington

Tim Horton’s six-concert Chopin Cycle started back in 2024 and sadly the series is nearly at its end. I was thrilled to be able to catch Horton’s penultimate concert at the Wigmore on January 16^th this year, where Ravel’s revolutionary waltzes were judiciously sandwiched between several late Chopin nocturnes and four Scherzos.

Throughout his Chopin series, Horton has paired Chopin with other composers – a way for Horton to present Chopin’s works in a fresh light.

Chopin’s  Nocturne in C minor Op 48 and Nocturne in F sharp minor were a good place to start, the works being both cherished by Chopin fans and examples of Chopin’s late, more musically developed nocturnes. Composed in1841, these fleshed out pieces, continue to be both entrancing and intriguing.

Horton dived into the 20th century with Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales, gleefully offering us Ravel’s impressions of early jazz and the frenetic dances of the music hall. The highly rhythmic and contemporary mood gave way to more lyrical, sedate passages suggesting a return to the waltz and the ballroom, Ravel’s nod to Chopin, whose music he had played at the Paris conservatoire, also an honouring of the waltz which had gripped old Europe for so long.

Chopin’s innovative Scherzos followed. Horton seemed to delight in the virtuosic play required – the frenetic runs, the keyboard leaps, dynamics from forte to pianissimo. He was exciting to watch and was able to maintain technical control as well as deliver passion and intensity.

“Horton places a huge amount of emphasis on intensive preparation for a concert and it showed. Without the score in front of him, Horton gave an air of playing instinctively, as if coming to the Scherzos for the first time. A terrific performance! He received an ovation.”

I caught up with Horton a few days later.

The Wigmore audience were drinking in your Chopin – how do you explain Chopin’s enduring appeal? In some respects, he is not always easy listening– I’m thinking of the highly intricate and technically demanding Scherzos you played tonight – they were magnificent by the way!

His appeal is based, fundamentally, on complexity of emotion. As with all great art, his music exists in ambiguity – there is never just one way for a phrase or piece to be interpreted or “felt.”

It might seem an odd thing to say about such a popular composer, but I think Chopin has been unfairly maligned at times. On the one hand, the fact that he has only written for piano creates an impression of some limitation. This makes little sense to me. Composers use the medium that they feel best conveys their ideas – for Berlioz and Mahler that was the orchestra, for Wagner, opera, for some composers, chamber music. Some are happy in many genres. For Chopin it was the piano. Rarely has there been a composer whose musical ideas and knowledge of a particular instrument have been so perfectly aligned.

On the other hand, he has been represented as a slightly weak character who pours forth limpid and dreamy, “romantic” music. The Hollywood of the 1930s has a lot to answer for in this regard. As you say his music is not always easy listening. In fact, it contains extraordinary strength and sometimes can verge on the violent – the first Scherzo, for example. His music is also very harmonically complex, especially in his last few years. There are many examples of pre-Wagnerian harmony that give a tantalising glimpse of what might have been had he not died so young.

How do you maintain your stamina (physical and mental) playing this sort of virtuosic repertoire. 

It is a matter of patience for me. I have always been a good sight-reader which has been a blessing for learning repertoire very quickly, but it has also been a hindrance at times. It can mean that I don’t necessarily learn things as thoroughly as I might, one reason why I choose to play from memory. In the last fifteen years or so this has changed. I build up solo repertoire very slowly and carefully now with many play-throughs. I do a lot of work away from the keyboard which includes visualisation techniques – imagining that I am on the Wigmore Hall stage, for example. In short, I do a huge amount of preparation. It is not something that can be hurried.

What are the challenges and the highs of performing live? Is it more challenging, for example, performing well known repertoire?

The popularity of the repertoire doesn’t daunt me. I learn and relearn pieces carefully regardless of their popularity. I have never been sympathetic with the idea of playing pieces differently from others for the sake of being different. I see where the learning process takes me. There is no end result in this process. One learns so much from a live performance – things can go wrong that you have never imagined might be a problem, but also the music can take flight in ways you hadn’t planned. Each performance informs the next.

What aspects of your successful musical career do you enjoy the most?

Chamber music has been the most important aspect of my career, especially in the last twenty years or so. My solo career has been growing in more recent years but it couldn’t happen without the immersion in chamber playing that I have been lucky enough to have. My colleagues in Ensemble 360 are a constant source of inspiration in this regard. Exposure to other people’s ideas is essential for me to be able to let my own ideas flourish. There is also listening involved, of course. With chamber music you must listen to others and respond with such care. This corresponds directly to the process of listening that is involved in my solo preparation.

What is the best advice you received when you were building up your career in solo piano performance?

My contact with Alfred Brendel was critical for my attitude to solo playing. He instilled an attention to detail that had been lacking in my playing previously. I once asked him how he dealt with nerves before a concert and he just said, “preparation.” At that time, I didn’t realise quite what he meant in terms of the amount of careful preparation that is needed. I really do now!

You finish your Chopin Cycle at the Wigmore in June this year. What composer/s will you be focussing on next?

I am embarking on my second complete cycle of Beethoven Sonatas for Music in the Round in Sheffield in December. The last ended in 2015.

I played many of the Schubert Sonatas a few years ago and I would like to explore much more of his music soon, maybe in conjunction with Schumann. I have always found their music particularly difficult to play – it is idealistic music with little regard for the difficulties presented to the performer. With Chopin and Beethoven, for example, you know the music works pianistically because of their own instrumental prowess, but this isn’t the case with Schumann and Schubert. Their music is some of the greatest I have encountered though so I feel a strong need to play it.

Is there a dream (artistic or other) project that you haven’t had the time to fulfil yet?

I would like to play a lot more late 20^th and 21^st century music. There are technical difficulties in a lot of new music that you don’t find elsewhere so it really does take a lot of time, for me, at least. The result of the wide variety of styles that exist in contemporary music is that there is no unified technique that applies to all of it, each composer presents their own difficulties.

I would love to learn Bach’s Well-Tempered Klavier. I have played some of them, but it would give me such pleasure to spend six months or so doing nothing else. It doesn’t seem likely at the moment.

What do you do to relax?

I love cooking and bread-making. I’m a big fan of cinema and good television. It’s such a pleasure to introduce my children to films that mean a lot to me. Talking with friends and family is incredibly important to me.

I do spend a lot of time on YouTube watching pianists and conductors perform. If one sees Gilels, Richter, Argerich, Annie Fischer, or countless other pianists play one learns a huge amount about musical gesture as well as technical matters. The same applies to conductors. I often think that there should have been classes at school on musical gesture involving the study of videos of Carlos Kleiber conducting.

Seen and Heard International, Mark Berry

“Another fine, perceptive recital in Tim Horton’s Chopin series at Wigmore Hall.”

The Op.48 Nocturnes, two of Chopin’s greatest, make for an arresting opening to any recital. This, the latest in Tim Horton’s Wigmore Hall series, was no exception.

“Again, I was struck by the freshly considered nature of the pianist’s interpretations: not so as to be different for the sake of it, but rather with good musical warrant that had me think – and rethink – pieces I thought I knew well.”

…The first section of the C minor Nocturne sounded with stronger differentiation than one generally hears between melody and accompaniment, setting up greater contrast both with the beautifully voiced four-part harmony of the middle section and with the newly turbulent accompaniment of the elaborated return, arising from and audibly growing out of both. The F-sharp minor Nocturne offered, naturally, a different relationship between harmony and counterpoint at its opening, again properly contrasted, and with a different, equally convincing synthesis at the close. This may sound simple, indeed dry, in written form, but in performance offered the key to understanding.

…

Presenting four Scherzi in a row might be thought of as tempting fate. Would they work better as record than concert programme? Not a bit of it, at least in the right hands… there is no one ‘right’ way in such music, and this offered its own rewards…

The Times, Richard Morrison
Five Stars

Alfred Brendel — pianist, poet, painter, philosopher and, until his death last June, one of the most revered musicians on the planet — deserved a celebration as many-splendoured as his own life. He certainly got one here.

On what would have been his 95th birthday, practically the whole British musical world gathered at the Barbican, either on stage or in the audience, for an epic three and a half hours of music-making. It encompassed tenderness and grandeur, the sublime and the surreal…

The Guardian, Erica Jeal

Pianist, poet and polymath, at once one of music’s most rigorous intellectuals and most mischievous minds – Alfred Brendel, who died in June, was an artist of fruitful contradictions. This marathon concert, on what would have been his 95th birthday, celebrated them with warm affection.

The music reflected Brendel’s own passions, skewing towards the classical repertoire…

“… the music really did do the talking. So, too, did the presence of so many pianists who counted Brendel as a mentor…. Tim Horton duetted with Brendel’s cellist son Adrian in an intensely felt performance of Liszt’s Elégie No 2…”

…

Photo credit: Chris Christodoulou

The Standard, Barry Millington

Thoroughly Good

Tim Horton is an unsung hero of the UK classical world: a warm, appreciative presence on stage, and a bright, assertive sound at the keyboard. His phenomenal stamina is well documented — the sheer quantity of repertoire he and his Ensemble 360 colleagues power through at the Sheffield Chamber Music Festival is proof enough.

“At Wigmore Hall this evening, he conjures a gentle, uncomplicated caress; snaking melodies twist, turn, and wrap around you; and, in the second half, he becomes the master of the lightning-quick grand flourish.”

The waterfall cascades of the opening C-sharp minor Prelude, Op. 45, mark the point at which he seems fully attuned to the audience and the acoustic. After that, JS Bach’s English Suite No. 2 provides an interesting contrast… The Prelude is fierce; the Allemande that follows has a contrasting colour: tender lyricism, well-pitched, with gentle rubato in the counterpoint giving an overall romantic sheen to Bach’s mathematical rhetoric…. We arrive at the concluding Gigue — stunning, exhilarating — with a sense that we’ve not only been on a journey but also arrived at a charming destination, tea and cake provided.

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.”