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Columba Dromgoole-Cavazzi (violin) & Duncan Honeybourne (piano)

Weymouth Lunchtime Chamber Concerts, 25 January 2023

Spring came early to Weymouth with a fine performance of music by Beethoven, Debussy and Cecilia McDowall at the first concert of 2023 presented by Weymouth Lunchtime Chamber Concerts (of which I am concerts manager).

Concert-goers escaping a cold, grey January day were warmed by the elegance and expression in Columba’s playing. This was a significant concert for her – her first post-graduation professional engagement.

Beethoven’s ‘Spring’ Sonata in warm F major reminded us that warmer days are not far away now. This was an enjoyable opener, Columba and Duncan finding an appealing ‘conversation’ between their two instruments, with some lovely interplay and humour, especially in the third movement, and a delightful freshness in the first and final movements.

After a short pause, the mood shifted to more unsettled, nocturnal territory with Cecilia McDowall’s Strange violin, the work inspired by the poem Der Nachbar (The Neighbour) by the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke. For me this was the highlight of the programme and, I felt, an unusual choice for a young violinist at the start of her professional career. And one which demonstrated very clearly that Columba is already at home with this kind of repertoire. Once again the violin and piano were in conversation, of a sort, yet this one was haunting, atmospheric, and elegiac. Long phrases in the violin, requiring great control to achieve a special lyricism and intensity of sound, contrasted with plangent, bell-like sounds in the piano before a more agitated middle section.

The concert closed with Debussy’s Violin Sonata, written in 1917 near the end of his life when he was terminally ill with a particularly unpleasant cancer. He wrote that the work was “an example of what may be produced by a sick man in time of war” and certainly the mood is autumnal and nostalgic, freighted with emotion, often unsettled. In his introduction, Duncan explained that he and Columba really enjoyed playing this piece and this came across very clearly in their performance which was highly expressive, replete with contrasting timbres and textures, and ever-alert to the mercurial moods and shifting colours of the music. In the final movement, turbulence and introspection are replaced by “tumultuous joy” (Debussy) and the piece closed on a triumphant note, a spring-like positivity returning.

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A thriving concert series serves music lovers of West London and provides a vital London debut venue for emerging pianistic talent through regular concerts, livestreams and an impressive video archive.

Tucked down a narrow lane in Ealing, west London, is St Mary’s Perivale, a tiny redundant medieval church. Just 7 miles from Marble Arch, St Mary’s Perivale is a classical music centre with a national reputation and growing international outreach. Concerts at the church are run by the indefatigable Hugh Mather, a retired doctor with a passion for the piano and classical music in general.

With a capacity of just 70, the venue reaches a much wider audience via its livestream concerts which are broadcast using state-of-the art video facilities (9 high-definition cameras, including one which gives a bird’s eye view of the piano keyboard, and 6 high-quality microphones), a good piano, perfect acoustics, and a dedicated fibre optic link to the internet. The result is outstanding livestreams and videos, enabling a far larger online audience to enjoy concerts from St Mary’s. In 2022, Hugh Mather and the team at St Mary’s were awarded ‘Lockdown Star’ by the Critics’ Circle for their activities during the pandemic in providing significant support to musicians who had little or no performing work otherwise.

Hugh Mather says:

Over the past four years we have taken a lead in livestreaming classical concerts, and pride ourselves of now being the foremost UK video broadcasting venue for instrumental and chamber music. During the pandemic, we initially broadcast daily recordings from our archive, and then over 150 ‘live’ concerts with no audience in the church. Since being allowed to admit an audience in September 2021, we have streamed another 150, making a total of over 300 broadcasts since June 2020 – more than any other venue.

We are passionate about the future of livestream classical concerts, which came to prominence in the pandemic in June 2020, when they were the only means of providing performing opportunities and income for musicians. At the time they were presumed to be a temporary pandemic phenomenon, but they have now become established as an important new way of enjoying concerts. There is a huge swathe of the population who cannot travel to attend concerts, and the convenience of being able to enjoy a concert in the comfort of one’s home, particularly via a smart TV, for little or no expense, is obviously attractive. While the livestream is not a complete substitute for the ‘real thing’, it is a different and valid option for many concert-goers. It is admittedly difficult to obtain emotional involvement in a concert when sitting alone at home, but this can be partially resolved by participating in ‘live-chats’, sharing opinions with other viewers, leading to the formation of on-line communities enjoying concerts together. The frisson of a ‘live’ event is important, providing an authentic ‘feel’ compared with watching old performances on YouTube.

St Mary’s Perivale has now developed a ‘hybrid’ concert model, catering for two separate audiences simultaneously: a small cohort of c50 local music-lovers in the church, and perhaps ten times as many viewers watching the broadcast on YouTube or Vimeo, either concurrently (about 50) or in the following few days (about 250 to 500 viewers, and sometimes more). The audience in the church provides the ambience and applause, and their donations usually cover the musicians’ fees. For the musicians, especially those who are at the start of their professional careers, the concerts, livestreams and videos offer important exposure from the viewing of their performances around the world – so far in over 50 countries. All concerts remain freely available to view for 3 weeks after a concert, and most are retained permanently.

View St Mary’s video archive here

The concert series presents 120 concerts per year or 3 a week in ‘term time’ and boasts an impressive roster of performers, including Pascal Nemirovski, Viv McLean, Emanuil Ivanov, Thomas Kelly (2021 Leeds competition finalist), Coco Tomita (strings category winner, BBC Young Musician 2020), Siqian Li, Evelyne Berezovsky, Tyler Hay (winner of the 2022 International Dudley Piano Competition), Peter Donohoe, Yuki Negishi, and many more, and in March presents a New Faces weekend festival to showcase up-and-coming young artists. The whole organization is run by unpaid volunteers, and receives no public subsidies or sponsorship

Full details of the spring/summer programme of concerts here

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I’ve been writing a series of essays for InterludeHK on pianists and their composers. Some are obvious choices – Gould, Schiff and Hewitt for Bach, for example. The selections are neither comprehensive nor definitive, and are by their very nature subjective – because they are selected by me. These articles are simply intended to offer readers some listening suggestions or a pointer to explore pianists and/or recordings with which they may not be familiar.

I tend not to read comments on my published essays these days, but I was amused – though not surprised – by some of the responses to my Pianists and their Composers articles. It is inevitable that such compilations will omit your favourite pianist for Bach, Beethoven, Schubert et al, and your choices will not necessarily align with mine.

“Wot, no XX, XX or XXX?” declared a ruffled reader on Twitter in response to my article on the music of Chopin. “How could you omit so-and-so?” demanded another on reading the article on Beethoven’s piano sonatas.

These responses demonstrate several important truths. First, that fans of classical music in general, and specific composers and artists in particular, care very deeply and are very attached to their favourite artists; secondly, that taste is a very personal, “me” thing.

Our musical taste is shaped from an early age, influenced initially by our parents’ listening habits, later by teachers, peers, friends, study, growing maturity, curiosity…. Our taste evolves and changes due to our experience of music, life experience, and a whole host of other factors – from mixtapes/playlists shared between friends at college to our first proper rock or classical concert or grand opera. Today the availability of a seemingly infinite amount of music of all genres means one’s taste and musical curiosity knows no bounds, if one allows it to graze freerange, uninhibited and with an open mind. Your taste won’t align with mine – and that’s fine. How dull life would be if we all liked the same thing!

But a word of caution: the quickest way to alienate me, or indeed anyone else who enjoys listening to music, is to tell them that their taste is “wrong”, or “bad”. Most of us don’t like music because we are told we should like it; nor do we stop liking it because we told shouldn’t like it!

Shameless begging bit:

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Beethoven
Piano Sonatas, Op. 10 Nos 1-3
Daniel Tong (fortepiano)
Resonus RES10307 

This sparkling new release from Daniel Tong opens with an explosive ‘Mannheim rocket’, the dramatic first sentence of the Piano Sonata in C minor, Op 10, No. 1, which sets the tone for an uplifting and very enjoyable listening experience.

Daniel Tong has been playing Beethoven “since I was nine years old and my teacher gave me a little Bagatelle by the master”, and the piano sonatas as well as the duo sonatas and piano trios are at the heart of Tong’s musical life. The pianist’s affection for this repertoire is evident not only in his close attention to details such as articulation or marks of expression, but also an appreciation of the composer’s wit and comic timing as well as his emotional depth.

Fortepiano made by Paul McNulty

This new release was made possible via crowdfunding and Tong recorded the sonatas on a copy of an 1815 Walter fortepiano, an instrument with which Beethoven would have been very familiar. The result is a more intimate sound, much more suited to the salon or hauskonzert than the grand concert hall. Yet these pieces are concert works and I am sure Beethoven intended them as such: these sonatas were written for the composer himself to perform, as a young piano virtuoso keen to show off his skill.

Chronologically speaking, these are “youthful” or “early” works, published when Beethoven was not yet 30, yet in their wit and inventiveness, range of expression and appreciation of the capabilities of the instrument they reveal a composer who had already absorbed the finer – and finest – points of sonata form. In these sonatas, we encounter a young composer with the world at his feet.

I have a special affection for the Opus 10 sonatas because I learnt the first one, in C minor, for my Grade 8 exam, taken back in the day (early 1980s) when one was required to perform an entire sonata. I loved the energy of the outer movements and the contrasting warmth and elegance of the slow movement whose melody and structure looks forward to that of the Pathétique sonata (Op 13). Tong neatly captures these contrasts: after the explosive energy and drama of the first movement, the slow movement is a welcome balm. Indeed, it is in the slow movements of each of these three sonatas, that I found the greatest depth of expression: the slow movement of the D major sonata (No. 3) is darkly sombre, spacious and operatic, and freighted with emotion, prefiguring the most profound slow movements of later sonatas.

For the listener more used to hearing these sonatas on a modern piano, Tong coaxes a remarkably rich range of details and colours from the fortepiano. The instrument is far less resonant than a modern piano, and the result is a more incisive, percussive and vibrant sound, with some wonderfully punchy bass details and a gloriously transparent treble.

Is this Beethoven’s piano sonatas as he might have heard them himself? Who knows – we are, sadly, not able to time travel back to late 18th-century Vienna, nor get inside Beethoven’s head to find out – but what this recording confirms is that Beethoven was a master of the sonata form, and Daniel Tong a worthy exponent of this wonderful repertoire.