This concert featured the swift return of the pianist to Leicester as he pursued his journey through Mozart’s Piano Sonatas. It is a journey which I think has created a number of varying responses from the Leicester audience. There have been some performances which have made this listener at least begin to revise his long held belief that, whilst this aspect of the composer’s output contained some jewels, generally if you wished to hear music that truly explained why for anyone with a shred of imaginative understanding Mozart is one of the greatest geniuses to be found in western art, one hardly goes first of all to the piano sonatas for proof. Furthermore, one has to ask whether it has it been wise to attempt some sort of blockbuster approach in a limited winter lunchtime series that as a result has apparently led to little other solo piano music being played.
This question can perhaps be answered shortly by pointing to the size of the audience this last Thursday. It was true that there appeared to be quite a few who had travelled to support the artist but that can hardly be a bad thing. In the long term, though, the absence of a number of stalwarts from the audience, one or two because they felt ,horror of horrors , that they had had their fill of Mozart, might give cause for concern. I have to admit that the question as to whether this evangelism is resulting in a joyous voyage of discovery is much more difficult to answer and this concert, at least for me, resulted in the jury remaining out.
Readers of this blog may recall that I finished listening to the second concert in the series in a good frame of mind. I felt that I had heard an intriguing and various recital, perhaps the result I gathered of some changes made to the original programme. That mood carried on into the opening work of this recital, the unfinished Fantasia in D K397. It was new to me and I found it an intriguing short journey whose shifts of mood finally settled into a memorable main melody before it’s brought to a peremptory ending. The work as a whole was presented in playing of beguiling simplicity.
That suitable directness of playing made for an experience of a late sonata ‘for beginners’, Sonata 16 K545, which was utterly delightful. The only word for the performance was blithe. Here the programme made a connection to Schubert whose early compositions likewise appear very straightforward and simple but demand a very precise lightness of touch which eludes quite a few. That was certainly not the case here and at this stage I was almost purring!
It was thus rather disconcerting that in the performances of Sonatas K.333 and 576, works in spirit seemingly not a million miles away from what we had already heard, the lightness of touch , the caressing of a phrase, the transparency so frequently evident in those performances became increasingly absent in interpretations which seemed to want to make the last two works of the recital into dramatic and heavyweight compositions. Perhaps it was simply the mounting adrenalin that commonly occurs during public performance but I increasingly found a gap between the adjectives the programme notes used to describe the musical world of these works and the sounds I was hearing. Singing ,simple , playful, ebullient, galloping, frothy, perky rarely fitted. Thus, qualities that had given so much pleasure early on largely disappeared, seemingly in the pursuit of a dramatic end to the concert.
And I thought it something of a shame that it was thus. Paradoxically I later heard of a complaint that the concert was more of the same. In this instance, I would have been rather happier had it been so!
The Diary of a Leicester Concert-goer 