Usher Hall, Four Stars
Beyond argument one of the finest practitioners of the art in the world, Mitsuko Uchida plays the piano, more than she plays the music. It is a fine distinction but one that was made clear in this clever EIF programme that was most obviously about Robert Schumann but most essentially about what the piano can do.
So her opening Bach, from Book 2 of the Well-Tempered Clavier, paid no heed to contemporary "period" practice but was more about how a pianist might greet the instrument in the privacy of the rehearsal room. The brief but captivating cycle of Six Little Piano Pieces by Schoenberg from two centuries later was here presented as another sort of experimental piano writing to stretch the fingers and the mind, before the luxury of a soak in Schumann.
We have been fortunate enough to welcome Uchida to Scotland on a number of occasions in recent years, and if there was a misgiving about all this it was the Usher Hall, while a fine orchestra venue, is less suited to such intimate chamber repertoire than Glasgow's City Hall or Perth Concert Hall. Neither of those venues, of course, could have accommodated half of those in this audience.
Three major works that covered the composing career of Schumann made up the bulk of the concert, but the link with the contrasting preceding works could hardly have been more obvious. The performance of Waldszenen Opus 82 that followed was designed to emphasise its exquisite construction, the "romance" being clearly in Schumann's inspiration from literature and nature, not any distracted mind. The delicacy that Uchida brought to the five-finger exercise of Vogel als Prophet carried through to the end of the piece and into the second half's Piano Sonata in G Minor and the powerfully forward-looking, Gesange der Fruhe.
The profound silence that persisted before the ecstatic applause that greeted this recital spoke volumes. Robert Schumann has enjoyed a lengthy moment in the sun in recent years, to which Uchida has made a substantial contribution. The eloquence of her command of his keyboard music is beyond front page promotion.
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