Hugi Guðmundsson: Calm of the Deep The Hamrahlíd Choir/Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir, Nordic Affect/Guðni Franzson (Smekkleysa)
It only takes one outstanding musician with links to an out-of-the-way place to gather his or her top-notch friends and give a mini-festival of international quality. They’re springing up all over the UK: guiding lights that come to mind are violinist Anthony Marwood in Peasmarsh and tenor Toby Spence at Wardsbrook Farm. Now another leading British tenor, Ben Johnson, has set up a Young Artists' Programme and a band of the brightest and best young string players in the village of Southrepps, less than two miles from the beautiful North Norfolk coast.
“Treeless and shrubless but for some tufts of broom, these corrugated ridges formed a lunar landscape, pale and inhuman.” Lushly green and densely planted, today the view out over Tuscany’s Val d’Orcia is unrecognisable as the blasted landscape first witnessed by author Iris Origo in 1923. From a barren wilderness, the valley was transformed by Origo and her husband into a thriving farm, crowned by one of Italy’s loveliest landscaped gardens, where now, some 80 years later, Origo’s children and grandchildren continue the family legacy.
From now until 12 September, when Wigmore darling Iestyn Davies returns to open the new season, the biggest names in instrumental music are to be heard in the biggest venue, the Albert Hall. With all eyes and ears turned by maximum publicity towards the Proms, folk may have forgotten that the Wigmore Hall concerts were ongoing until last night.
A peninsular spirit of place and the greatest of instrumentalists drew me a second time to the eastern nook (hence the “Neuk”) of Fife. But could a second report for theartsdesk be justified – wasn’t the premise the same for the 11th East Neuk Festival as it had been at the 10th? Not quite.
One man and his piano can occasionally fulfil a role more satisfying than the finest orchestra in full sail. The last of Daniel Barenboim's four-recital traversal of Schubert's piano sonatas proved just such an occasion. Since the first concert last week, perhaps all the ingredients had settled in a five-way exchange, with artist, piano, audience, hall and music each coming to terms with all of the others and finding a new modus vivendi.
“You don’t love Schubert’s music?” Such, according to the greatest of living Schubert interpreters Elisabeth Leonskaja, was the response of her mentor Sviatoslav Richter to students who omitted the exposition repeats in the piano sonatas. Daniel Barenboim doesn’t observe them either, on the evidence of yesterday afternoon's concert, but four recitals and much in them ought to prove that he does love Schubert’s music, or rather has his own vision of how it ought to go.
Personality is essential for Schubert’s piano sonatas. Listen to two recordings of the same one and you could easily think they are different works, such is the performer's input. Daniel Barenboim would therefore seem ideal. He’s a huge personality – he even has his own name emblazoned in large gold letters on the lid of his piano: a personality verging on a cult. But it’s not quite right for this music.
It’s not often that you arrive for a piano recital to see members of the audience on the stage, clustering around the instrument and taking photos of it. Those curious about the newly unveiled, straight-strung Barenboim-Maene concert grand (the name above the keyboard is simply BARENBOIM) were periodically ushered away from it; it was closed and reopened several times before it was time for the maestro himself to take control.
It looked like a potential misalliance between performers used to looking at the stars and a programme of earthly, ideally rather broadly humorous delights. In the event, Martha Argerich, who can turn her high, lucid playing to most ends, sought out a sharp-edged wit if not a relaxed warmth in Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto. The real magic came later in the first half. But in the second, Daniel Barenboim seemed to have a very strange concept indeed of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life), a work which can seem oddly repellent without lashings of exuberant epic parody – there was hardly any in this poker-faced performance – and worse still when pulled around so that the line through it sags and snaps.
So which was it to be with the Beethoven concerto (actually his second) – a look backwards to Mozart, or forward to bigger adventures? No need to choose with these wide-ranging artists. The full range was here, from the Staatskapelle Berlin’s hushed but beautifully sprung opening, Argerich drumming out right hand patterns while she waited for her entry, to heroic trumpets and drums; and from Argerich in playful mood to precipitous, improvisational-seeming wonders at the end of the first-movement exposition. It’s my problem if most Beethoven concerto slow movements induce torpor and switch-off; not this one – even if its clarinet writing comes frustratingly nowhere near what Mozart achieved with the instrument in his late, great piano concertos. Not that I felt any such problem, or any flaw at all, in a concerto partnership, Imogen Cooper's with Iván Fischer and the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, which for sheer charm and freshness outstripped this one and will somehow burn more strongly in the memory.
Still, despite the youthful antics and ever-changing stresses of the finale, beautifully underlined by Argerich, this is not the sort of work for which a standing ovation comes naturally. At least that got us the real gem – the Rondo in A, D951, of Schubert’s miraculous if tragic last year, four hands at one piano, with Barenboim taking the first part to Argerich’s second. Barenboim's runs and trills weren't always crystal clear, and the whole wasn't spacious enough to be my personal ideal – that would be the likes of Richter and his various duo partners – but still, it's one for the history books. The duo certainly communicated infinite delicacy and an alertness to the subtle shifts of mood in unmistakeable late Schubert (Argerich and Barenboim taking a bow, pictured above).
In the light of their curate's-egg recording, a certain nervousness was in order for the Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim interpretation of Ein Heldenleben. The strings were full-blooded in well-moulded climaxes but never sensuous – a shortcoming in a love-scene the only interest of which lay in the clarity of the two swooning, glissandoing harps. Leader/concertmaster Wolfram Brandl’s extensive portrait of the "Hero’s Companion" – Frau Pauline Strauss in an appendage to what I’ve always taken to be a tongue-in-cheek self-portrait – turned out to be a far from flawless technical exercise rather than the necessary characterization of infinite variety.
Yet the real problem was the way in which every time Barenboim wanted dynamics to plunge, the tempo and edge did too, making this a chilly Mercedes of a performance which seemed to be constantly running out of juice. Sometimes the quiet was justified, but softness sapped the proud new theme of the hero’s return from battle and what should be the high noon of the “Works of Peace” section, in which Strauss reviews themes from his works up to 1899 and weaves them into one gorgeous tapestry. That started too briskly and then turned to mush when it should have glowed the most. A first-horn rudeness shattered the returning calm of “The Hero’s Retirement from the World”, and brass intonation was often dodgy (though full marks to the first trumpet for crowning the battle). This time I wasn’t in the mood for an encore, and we didn’t get one. Elgar’s Second Symphony, a much deeper work, will need to flow more convincingly tonight.
Overleaf: watch Argerich and Barenboim play the Schubert A major Rondo