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Fiona Maddocks's rating
Reader rating
Andras Schiff: Brings colour, clarity, transparency of line to the music
London’s hunger for Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas has yet to be assuaged.
Andras Schiff, named today as one of the Evening Standard’s 1000 Influentials, opened the autumn leg of the Temple Festival 2008 with a recital of four middle period sonatas.
This pianist’s pianist (Schiff is always one of those named as an ultimate virtuoso among his peers) has a dedicated following of people prepared to pin back their ears and sit in rapt, sometimes terrified silence.
The cougher or rustler is quite liable to be ticked off or invited to take their careless habits elsewhere.
This Hungarian maestro demands as much from his audience as he gives.
Celebrated for his Bach and Schubert, Schiff came late to Beethoven, describing him as a “suit I still had to grow into”.
He recently finished recording the complete sonatas on ECM.
This concert mirrored the contents of Volume V, the Opus 31 sonatas, together with the majestic Waldstein Op 53.
What does Schiff bring? Colour, clarity, transparency of line and above all a serenity and poise that let the music to breathe.
However explosive or dramatic, it is never hard driven.
In the opening Op 31 No 1 in G, irony and wit dominate.
This lightness turns to dark in Op 31 No 2, The Tempest, with its moments of mysterious recitative and an airborne, almost waltz-like lyrical finale.
Then comes the strange, soft brilliance of the E flat Sonata Op 31 No 3.
Hearing these works in sequence, Schiff barely pausing between movements, you had a sense of steady musical growth towards the grandeur of the Waldstein.
Always with Beethoven, every idea derives from the simplest palette of scales and arpeggios, major and minor, tonic and dominant.
But try playing Czerny, his contemporary, whose piano studies are uninvitingly called The Art of Finger Dexterity and The School of Velocity.
They show the recipe without the art, the mechanics without the poetry that Schiff elicits from Beethoven’s every page, every bar, every note.
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Schiff just played at Carnegie Hall. Wit and then some. I found myself smiling at the same time the woman next to me could not contain a quick giggle. Her small tee-hee did not intrude, but added to the savour.
Schiff's clarity is extraordinary, and he pulls even a casual listener into thematic lines in a seemingly effortless manner. The highest form of the art is to SEEM effortless
- D. Serbe, NYC United States
Many thanks for this super review.
- Dar, whitby,on,canada
