Ingrid Fliter, Wigmore Hall

Flu-ridden pianist coughs but still plays Chopin staggeringly

Will she? Won't she? Ooh? Ah? No to the Mazurka? Yes to the Barcarolle? We were an audience on tenterhooks last night as flu-ridden Ingrid Fliter coughed and spluttered her way through her Chopin recital at the Wigmore Hall, chopping and changing her programme every five minutes as her fever came and went. The amassed audience willed her on enthusiastically. London was falling in love with Fliter.

Nikolai Demidenko, Wigmore Hall

Russian pianist proves himself an expert dreamcatcher

Piano ballades and fantasies are the repositories of dreams. They are the places where the mind is left to wander, to roam precipitously, unaided by known paths, undisturbed by familiar structures. The romantic fantasies and ballades of last night's Wigmore Hall recital plunge and soar, catch you by the feet and dangle you by the ankles.

Pictures Reframed: Leif Ove Andsnes & Robin Rhode, QEH

The pianist reimagines Musorgsky's masterwork with video extras

We watch and listen simultaneously so much today that it hardly seems blasphemous for a superlative pianist to decide to conceive an evening of piano music plus video installation. Leif Ove Andsnes has doubts about the transmittability of classical music to a general audience today - he calls the status quo into question, and he may be right. So he turned a concert programme into a video show, focusing on Musorgky’s Pictures at an Exhibition and Schumann’s Kinderszenen, to which would be set a visual installation around him and his piano.

Elisabeth Leonskaja, Wigmore Hall

Russian pianist's all-Chopin recital is seriously beautiful

Elisabeth Leonskaja, who turned 64 on Sunday, is one of the last links to a grand school of Russian pianism where technique meant the marshalling of piano possibilities into a positively orchestral array of expressive means. Often noted in harness with Sviatoslav Richter, with whom she frequently played, Leonskaja deserves renown of her own. Her all-Chopin recital last night at the Wigmore Hall had a splendour and focus that was truly of the Russian tradition, fervent in feeling, masterly in discipline, a serious line in beauty.

Till Fellner, Wigmore Hall

Elegant performances from a gentleman pianist

Much like Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in G, Op 79, with which he started the programme, I’ll get straight to the point. Till Fellner is a very good pianist. To demonstrate this, I’d like to jump to the last sonata of five we heard in this all-Beethoven programme last night: the Piano Sonata in E flat, Op 7. When you look at this music on the page, you could easily see this piece becoming a bumptious triplet-fest of mind-numbing proportions. When it is  in the capable and stylish hands of someone like Fellner, it turns into an artful musical argument, with unexpected turns at every corner and moments of gentle filigree that belie the technique and musicality beneath.

Imogen Cooper 60th Birthday Concert, Wigmore Hall

Schubert stars in a birthday party of chamber proportions

The great and the good came to Imogen Cooper’s 60th birthday concert. In fact, so thick with friends and fellow pianists was the Wigmore Hall, that at the end there seemed to be as many people going backstage to congratulate her as were leaving through the front doors. In that quietly embarrassing, I-hope-no-one-saw way, after some light-hearted Schumann, I thought for a moment she flashed a smile at me and – charmed – smiled back, but it turned out that I was sitting behind Brendel. It was that sort of audience.