EIF music reviews: Paul Lewis – Tribute to Alfred Brendel | Coleridge-Taylor’s The Song of Hiawatha
Pianist Paul Lewis’s tribute to Austrian classical legend Alfred Brendel was a thoughtful, richly expressive reaffirmation of his own musical voice, but Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Song of Hiawatha proved a more curious and uneven festival discovery.
MUSIC
Paul Lewis - Tribute to Alfred Brendel ★★★★
Queen’s Hall
Asked last year what Alfred Brendel was like as a teacher, the pianist Paul Lewis revealed that “Brendel was really only interested in unleashing the personal conviction behind a performance, not in producing clones of himself.” As if to prove that point, Lewis - giving the second of the Festival’s three tribute recitals to Brendel - reaffirmed his own unique interpretational perspective in expressive, clear-minded performances of Mozart, Schubert and Chopin.
Take the two Mozart B flat Sonatas that bookended Thursday’s programme. The opener, K570, instantly characterised by a didactic matter-of-factness, felt liberated by judiciously fluid lyrical interplay, despite the odd harshness in the upper melodies. Fast forward to K333, and the demeanour was no less sophisticated, but now radiating a softer grade poeticism.
Between these sonatas, high-end drama inhabited Schubert’s late 3 Klaverstücke, the initial stormy waters lulled by a more airy Allegretto and the whimsical spring of the final Allegro. Its texturing felt wholesomely preemptive of Brahms, who was, of course, the impetus behind the posthumous publication of these pieces.
But it was to Chopin that Lewis then turned, with the fiercely impassioned theatre of the C sharp minor Polonaise, and the supple, dreamy delights of the Deux Nocturnes, Op32. Ken Walton
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MUSIC
Coleridge-Taylor’s The Song of Hiawatha ★★★
Usher Hall
It’s the role of a great festival to present the obscure, the provocative, the little-known wonder. Last year’s opener, John Tavener's sprawling meditation made its point, a risk which delivered astonishment. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Song of Hiawatha, however, presents a raft of anomalies. Setting Longfellow's sprawling 19th poem, the strange hazy tale of a fictional Native American hero and the supposed myth and legend which propels him, eventually, to a divine hereafter, Coleridge-Taylor creates a work which, while it flows, at times burbles, and has its golden moments, is made up of curious musical decisions. With the resources available to him, the work seems oddly distributed, Longfellow's text, full of lovingly described and eccentric characters with onomatopoeic First Nation names, has no real reflection in the music. We hear lyrical descriptions of falling snow, rushing water, with no glimmer of word painting in the orchestral writing, this primarily a romantic upwelling.
More oddity: each orchestral section, brass, wing, strings, plays within its own grouping – wind solos, other than twinkle of the piccolo, never soar from the body of sound. The horns play splendidly, the bright brass proclaim, but there is no interplay or exchange of colour. The choral writing, bold and here tremendously sung, similarly delivers a great warm block of voices which never converse with each other; they express the reams of words as a solid community.
Three soloists lifted the texture considerably, Nicky Spence's tenor clarion, Christopher Maltman's baritone menacing, and crystal clear above the general emulsion, Francesca Chiejina's soprano. The orchestra, when it had its moment at Act 3's start, sounded liberated, suddenly free to express its own distinctive voice.
Still, I'd defend EIF's decision to present the piece, a lengthy, charming, earnest unfurling of the well-meaning if sanitised history of voices part ignored and presently justly celebrated. Truly zoongide'ewin (brave). Mary Miller
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