Music
Steven Osborne
Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow
Michael Tumelty
Five Stars
WHAT is the effect that music has on people? I’ve seen folk laugh, cry, argue, seethe, fight and embrace following a performance. I’ve done these things myself. But I have never abandoned a planned shopping operation and just gone home to sit quietly after a performance, better off in cash (a bit) though rather short on grub. That experience we should christen “the Steven Osborne, late-Beethoven effect”.
I have no idea how many times I’ve heard Osborne play since a long-ago review of the man as a teenager at the St Magnus Festival. He’s now an international star with an encyclopaedic repertoire and an extraordinary history of success in performance and recording. But I swear that his performance on Friday of Beethoven’s last two Piano Sonatas, in A flat major and C minor/major, for all they were occasionally tinged with the blips that occur in the course of live performance at white heat, just about surpassed anything I’ve heard him do in the concert hall.
He illuminated depths in the A flat Sonata that I have previously found a bit opaque, such as giving an insight in sound into why Beethoven sits on the same chord in the finale, repeating it 10 times before the return of the fugue, upside down. (I kid you not.) And Osborne’s transcendent reading of the last sonata which, after a shatteringly-dramatic opening movement, soared into eternity, stillness and silence, moved me to the core and resulted in my abject failure as a shopper. His Schubert “interlude” was profound, while the candour of his spoken presentation enthralled. It was the complete Osborne experience.
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