Festival Music
Mitsuko Uchida
Usher Hall
Svend McEwan-Brown
five stars
"ELEGANCE" and "poise" are woefully over-used epithets lazily applied to the playing of Mitsuko Uchida. Risk-taking, probing, fiery, rigorous, fearless, profound, honest, unsettling, moving: all of these (and more) describe what we heard in the Usher Hall on Monday.
It is a mark of her standing that Uchida could draw a packed hall for music that is far from easy – and a mark of her own spirit that she made nothing easy for herself, introducing a challenging new piece by Jörg Widmann alongside two tremendous works by Schumann. With nice irony, she prefaced them all with Mozart’s "sonata facile" (easy sonata), one that piano students the world over will have played, but how many will ever achieve the luminous serenity of her Andante, or the vivacity of the Rondo.
Widmann took that Mozart sonata as inspiration, creating a kind of poltergeist double of it, wilfully ripping it apart, distorting recognisable phrases, scattering "wrong notes". It needs more hearings to decide whether much of this was wilful paint-throwing, but in his Andante he attained a truly spectral beauty, meditating on Mozart in exquisite multi-layered textures and ravishing soft harmony.
Truly, though, the evening belonged to Schumann. One piece took just four days to write (Kreisleriana, Op 16), the other, three years (Fantasie, Op 17). They could not be more different. The Fantasie is dedicated to Liszt and belongs to the realm of the virtuosi – a formidable test of stamina, intellect and insight. The profound silence that met its close is a measure of how deeply Uchida drew us into its world. But for me, Kreisleriana was the powerful, dark heart of the evening, and Uchida took it the brink of the abyss in a performance that utterly unsettled and thrilled.
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