sat 23/08/2025

piano

Joanna MacGregor, Howard Assembly Room, Leeds

Joanna MacGregor walks on stage purposefully, clutching a manuscript of paving-slab dimensions, promptly sits down and starts to play, smiling. The opening measures of Messiaen’s Regard du Père steal in gently, and for the next 120 minutes we are...

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Ingrid Fliter, Wigmore Hall

Will she? Won't she? Ooh? Ah? No to the Mazurka? Yes to the Barcarolle? We were an audience on tenterhooks last night as flu-ridden Ingrid Fliter coughed and spluttered her way through her Chopin recital at the Wigmore Hall, chopping and...

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Nikolai Demidenko, Wigmore Hall

Piano ballades and fantasies are the repositories of dreams. They are the places where the mind is left to wander, to roam precipitously, unaided by known paths, undisturbed by familiar structures. The romantic fantasies and ballades of last night's...

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Pictures Reframed: Leif Ove Andsnes & Robin Rhode, QEH

We watch and listen simultaneously so much today that it hardly seems blasphemous for a superlative pianist to decide to conceive an evening of piano music plus video installation. Leif Ove Andsnes has doubts about the transmittability of classical...

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Elisabeth Leonskaja, Wigmore Hall

Elisabeth Leonskaja, who turned 64 on Sunday, is one of the last links to a grand school of Russian pianism where technique meant the marshalling of piano possibilities into a positively orchestral array of expressive means. Often noted in harness...

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Till Fellner, Wigmore Hall

Till Fellner's ear for detail makes an artful musical argument compelling

Much like Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in G, Op 79, with which he started the programme, I’ll get straight to the point. Till Fellner is a very good pianist. To demonstrate this, I’d like to jump to the last sonata of five we heard in this all-Beethoven...

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Imogen Cooper 60th Birthday Concert, Wigmore Hall

The great and the good came to Imogen Cooper’s 60th birthday concert. In fact, so thick with friends and fellow pianists was the Wigmore Hall, that at the end there seemed to be as many people going backstage to congratulate her as were leaving...

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