Tag Archives: Ian Bostridge

EIF: Anderszewski | Bostridge & LSO Members

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Polish pianist Piotr Anderszewski has been touting his potent coupling of Brahms and Bartok for a while now. That the former consists of a variable selection from the sizeable Op 116 – 119 collections ensures that not every recital manifestation is the same. On the other hand the Bartok – his fascinatingly experimental 14 Bagatelles – remain an exhilarating constant.

For this Queen’s Hall recital, Anderszewski threw his morning audience by altering the printed menu, his original Brahms choice now filtered down to the three later opuses. Not that it mattered. Rarely will you hear such detailed and insightful interpretations of Brahms, and such is the extraordinary range of character, colour and inventiveness the composer invested in these pieces –  mainly Intermezzi in this cross-section – that the expressive options for the pianist proved endless.

These were highly personal interpretations, Anderszewski easing us in with an almost Impressionistic opening to the B minor Intermezzo from Op 119. His tonal control was mesmerising throughout, endlessly explorative, his use of pedal and the piano’s natural resonance resulting in some hypnotic, surreal moments, as in the last of his Op 116 choices. Opting to play the entire Brahms first half without interruption introduced a macro dimension, the encompassing arc of which both heightened and deepened the listener experience 

There was one non-Intermezzo – the Rhapsody in E flat from Op 119 – which offered a moment’s intellectual respite, its punchy framework and lyrical inner episodes preciously refreshing the ears. 

So, too, the Bartok took us into another world, an early 20th century (1908) reminder of the journey the Hungarian composer was embarking on with his fusion of gnawing modernism and native folk song. Anderszewski’s performances captured both the precision of the writing – sometimes stripped down to single tantalising monodic line – and the penetrating warmth of its folk-inspired motifs. For his encore, Anderszewski turned to his homeland and the preciously romantic world of Chopin. Like all that had gone before, it was exquisite.

Ian Bostridge “considered affection, bundles of wit”

If expectations were high for Wednesday’s ad hoc ensemble of Ian Bostridge (tenor), Sir Antonio Pappano (piano) & Members of the LSO, the outcome was perfectly amiable, by its very nature spontaneous, but just short of all-embracing. Like the artists (a convenience arising out of the LSO’s 2025 Festival residence) the programme was a solid English-based composite: song cycles by Britten and Vaughan Williams, and the stormy ebb and flow of Elgar’s hefty Piano Quintet in A minor.

Bostridge’s performances are often ones you might care to digest with your eyes shut, such are their anguished physicality and wretched declamation. But these were markedly more relaxed, in a way that allowed the idiosyncratic tenor to project the music’s sentiments with considered affection, often bundles of wit.

He and Pappano (the LSO’s current chief conductor) opened with Britten’s Winter Words, eight settings of Thomas Hardy, written in 1953. These are gorgeously economical in concept, their charismatic imagery amplified by utter clarity of texture. At its heart is the extended narrative of The Choirmaster’s Funeral, which the duo performed with alluring charm, not least its ghostly sentimentality. Images of train whistles, solo fiddling and the final song’s moving ambiguity added to the generally rich enjoyment. Only momentarily did Bostridge overcook the higher notes.

A quartet of LSO strings joined the ranks for Vaughan Willams’ E A Housman settings, On Wenlock Edge, adding an additionally luscious layer to the sound palette. The rich suggestiveness in the string writing – not least its influencing by Ravel – wasn’t lost in a performance that, when all cylinders were perfectly firing, attained thrilling heights. Bostridge, again, embraced the music with calibrated intimacy, whether in the light satire of Is My Team Ploughing?, or the more expansive transcendence of Bredon Hill. 

Not entirely consistent was the string quartet, fine players individually – including LSO leader Benjamin Marquise Gilmore, more familiar to Edinburgh concertgoers as ex-leader of the SCO – but not always finding complete compatibility together. Not everything sounded instinctively together, an apprehensiveness that weakened some attacks and, more generally, the dynamic synergy of the group.

That was tested more in the Elgar which, by and large, flowed with engaging intent. Pappano, at the piano, was the driving force, egging on the feverish impetus of the outer movements. By far the most sumptuous, contented playing came in the central Adagio, its wistful stillness an oasis of calm between the agitations of the opening Allegro and the brighter moods and resolute conclusion of the Finale.  

Ken Walton

EIF: Emelyanychev; Kanneh-Mason; Bostridge

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Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

As a constant presence in the Edinburgh International Festival, the Queen’s Hall 11am concerts have once again proved a regular comfort blanket at that brunch time of the day. But there’s a change this year that seems hard to justify, and which has lessened the completeness of the experience. 

For whatever reason – and I’m guessing production and commissioning costs may be a factor – the Festival has ditched its comprehensive programme booklets and replaced them at the extreme with skimpy free leaflets. The programme listings are skeletal, any notes to clarify context are either minimal or non-existent. Okay, you can unfold it to reveal a frankly useless poster, but there has to be a happy medium where better quality information can be articulated.

So thank goodness for the music. 

Tuesday was pure entertainment with a touch of class. This was Maxim Emelyanychev & Principals of the SCO, in other words conductor and players, but with the effervescent Russian maestro swapping his baton for a fortepiano. The music was exclusively Mozart – at least that’s what the meagre programme sheet told us – whereas Emelyanychev chose to insert Haydn’s acrobatic Fantasia in C where an Improvisation was indicated, albeit personalised by him turning Haydn’s “lunga” pauses into pure Victor Borge moments where endless waits – twiddling of thumbs – drew the laughter as intended.

But that was the magic of this programme, good-humoured repartee mixed with classy music-making. Emelyanychev was joined firstly by violinist Stephanie Gonley, violist Max Mandel and cellist Philip Higham in Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, a work constructed around intricate interplay that was playfully realised by the ensemble: a robust opening Allegro and spring-like Rondo finale separated by one of the composer’s most heart-stopping Andantes.

Clarinettist Maximiliano Martin brought contrasted texture to the ‘Kegelstatt’ Piano Trio in E flat, a performance in which he and Mandel jostled lyrically, initially reflectively, and ultimately with heightened spirit. After the Haydn intermission came the meat of the programme, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 12, K414 – the smaller A major compared to the later K488 – in a string chamber version that expanded the original group to include violinist Marcus Barcham-Stevens and double bass Nikita Naumov.

It was a triumph of scale, the sparkling delicacy of Emelyanychev’s fortepiano an integral yet dominant answer to the intimacy of the wider ensemble – a tasteful protagonist. In truth, it was also a much more cleanly assured performance than the concert opener, in which the apparent use of gut strings required some settling in.

For the following day’s cello-piano duo recital by Sheku Kanneh-Mason and Harry Baker, the repertoire was a lighter mix, founded on the principle that Bach’s influence threaded through it, and that his influence straddled the worlds of classical and jazz. In the latter camp, Baker’s velvety jazz persona held sway, adapting the coolest of numbers by Bill Evans (Waltz for Debby – Kanneh-Mason striking up a mean walking bass), Pat Metheney (the gentle whimsy of James) and the upbeat soul of Laura Mvula’s Green Garden. Kanneh-Mason collaborated in a laid-back arrangement of La Havas’ Sour Flower. 

Two Janacek works – more Baker arrangements in a steely selection of Moravian Folksongs and a straight but expansive reading of the Czech composer’s Pohádka – and the pair’s jointly composed Prelude and Fugue (a mixed success in the style of Shostakovich) completed the opening half.

Bach’s solo Cello Suite No 1 wove a binding thread through the second half, Kanneh-Mason’s warm performances (if occasionally rocked by ill-tuned double-stopping) sitting prettily with the stylistic offshoots of he and Baker’s free-flowing improvisation on Bach’s chorale “Ich ruf zu dir”, the heightened rhythmic idiosyncrasies of music from Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No 2, and a dizzy sign-off duo arrangement of Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D flat minor.

Thursday’s Lieder recital promised its own curiosity factor, the combination of Ian Bostridge and Steven Osborne in a programme that wrapped Schubert’s song cycle Schwanengesang around four miscellaneous settings of appropriate verse. It was often painful to watch. How on earth does Bostridge pull such agonised facial contortions, as if Munch’s The Scream has come horrifyingly to life? Neither Rellstab’s or Heine’s poems necessarily warrant such histrionics, yet away from the visual agony there was considerable depth and lyrical poignance in the tenor’s delivery. 

Indeed, he and Osborne made a profound coupling, the Scots pianist complementing Bostridge’s intensity with deep, searching tone production and instinctive responses to the singer’s expressive freedom. From the calm of Liebesbotschaft to the literary cuckoo in the nest – the breezy closing setting of Seidl’s Die Taubenpost – it was the sense of unwavering conviction that won the day. The centrally inserted songs offered a breath of fresh air in the midst of the heat.

Ken Walton