This was music 'written to be enjoyed amongst friends'
and was presented as a seasonal offering before Christmas. Only a small
audience came however, deterred no doubt by an exploratory programme
and one that took the ever-popular Emma Kirkby outside her usual
repertoire - perhaps critics should not have been invited. Beethoven's
arrangements, made strictly for money, were commissioned by the Scottish
publisher George Thompson, and though they can sound disappointing on
CD, even though they have been recorded by famous singers, their charm
is evident in a live music making situation. This programme however,
would have been better in a less clinical setting than the Purcell Room,
where the hard reflective surfaces did not flatter Emma Kirkby's voice.
For a change her vibrato-less style was charming enough in the Haydn
& Beethoven songs, but proved quite unsuited to the unsophisticated
Edwardian ballad idiom of the songs by Amy Beach, some of them
with obbligato strings to augment the piano accompaniments, and there
were some strained notes quite uncharacteristic of her usual ease of
delivery. Phillip Scharwenka's Trio in G (1902) was less than
memorable, though worth hearing once, but the promise of 'delicate almost
Mahlerian episodes' proved illusory. James Lisney played the first two
movements of Schubert's substantial Sonata in E minor pleasingly, with
a good sense of style, but in the notes with Gilbert
Schuchter's complete Schubert for Tudor
Records, the common assumption that it is a two movement torso (wrongly
considered by many to be based on Beethoven's Op.90) and Lisney's contention
that this is the best way to present it is convincingly refuted in a
full discussion of its chequered history.
I cannot resist, in my last report of the year, another
opportunity to mention that Schuchter set as my greatest classical music
on CD discovery of 2001, with the same pianist's 10-CD boxed Complete
Piano Works of Mozart (received only a few days ago) a close runner
up and another great bargain (Tudor 7084).
Peter Grahame Woolf
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