United Kingdom Edinburgh Worldwide Pageant 2024 [3]: Queen’s Corridor, Edinburgh. (SRT)
6.8.2024 – Leonore Piano Trio.
Clara Schumann – Piano Trio, Op.17
Helen Grime – The Brook Sings Loud
Dvořák – Piano Trio No.3 in F minor, Op.65
8.8.2024 – Alexandre Kantorow (piano).
Brahms – Rhapsody in B minor, Op.79 No.1
Liszt – Chasse-neige; Années de Pèlerinage: Vallée d’Obermann
Bartók – Rhapsody, Op.1
Rachmaninov – Sonata No.1
The Queen’s Corridor most likely didn’t know what had hit it over the primary weekend of this yr’s Edinburgh Worldwide Pageant. After the theatrics of Jakub Józef Orliński’s on Saturday morning (evaluation right here), it then hosted a scorching efficiency of Latin American choral music choral music from the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela.
So settling right down to what most likely includes ‘regular’ might need come as one thing of a aid to what usually serves because the pageant’s demure residence of chamber music. There wasn’t a lot that was secure about these two performances, although: each in their very own methods had been daring and looking out.
That mentioned, essentially the most daring factor in regards to the Leonore Piano Trio’s programme was additionally the least profitable. Helen Grime’s The Brook Sings Loud is impressed by the pibroch, often called the classical music of the bagpipe world. It’s a set of variations that Grime wrote with folks enjoying in thoughts although, in actuality, the variation type made it really feel bitty and fragmentary. It’s partly a research in togetherness (from the strings) versus separateness (of the piano), however the writing is wiry and sinuous in order that texture takes priority over melody. The Leonores performed it with the lithe seriousness it wanted, however they couldn’t make it cohere successfully, and total the piece struggled to seek out its centre.
That wasn’t true of Clara Schumann’s Piano Trio, which they performed with an total tone of restrained dignity, punctured by passionate outbursts. Her Scherzo lollops somewhat awkwardly, however the sluggish motion sounded nice with its lyrical, long-breathed violin line.
If Benjamin Nabarro’s violin was the star of the Schumann, then Gemma Rosefield’s cello stole the limelight in Dvořák’s F minor Trio, enjoying with attractive, flowing heat within the slower, lyrical sections, particularly so within the sluggish motion with its attractive sense of beneficiant unfolding. Elsewhere they performed the trio with an appropriately symphonic sense of weight, from the intense first motion to the dance-driven finale, and there was a perceptible change of tone with the music lastly sweetened into the key key within the closing pages.
However in the event you had been in search of symphonic weight then one man offered all of it by himself in Thursday morning’s recital. French pianist Alexandre Kantorow whipped up a storm on the keyboard; a musical storm maybe much more highly effective than the literal storm that drenched him in the course of the opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics. His pianism is so muscular and assertive that he’s able to not solely whipping up however controlling fistfuls of chords at each flip, one thing that his big-boned programme wanted him to do lots. A singing high quality shines by constantly, although, usually discovering marvellous lyricism in even the fieriest passages.
That characterised his superbly balanced Brahms, and his Liszt performances grew from the rippling magnificence on the opening of the ‘snowstorm’ etude into one thing threatening and sinister by the center. His Vallée d’Obermann was easy, virtually hymn-like in locations, however all the time with an unstoppable power surging beneath the floor, one thing that was equally true of his Bartók, which was flavoured with a perceptibly jap European tang of squeezed harmonies and ostentatious runs that might disappear upwards into skinny air.
Rachmaninov’s Sonata No.1 carried the Aristocracy in its forcefulness, Kantorow managing to carry on to a way of thriller within the music, not solely within the love scene of the sluggish motion, with its haunted sense of loss and impossibility, but in addition within the demonic perpetual movement machine of the finale, whose concluding double octaves appeared like bells tolling with a horrible finality. His encore, Nina Simone’s transcription of the love theme from Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalilah, was as shocking because it was deliciously slushy. One viewers member offered him with a bunch of flowers on the finish: he deserved it.
Simon Thompson
The Edinburgh Worldwide Pageant runs at venues throughout town till Sunday twenty fifth August. Click on right here for additional particulars.
