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Trpceski & Montero to Ferneyhough Royal Festival Hall & LSO St Luke's 16 February 2008 Two events in London on Saturday epitomised the range of 'classical' music making and listening available in London. The Festival Hall has verily become the People's Palace once again, its foyers and bars crowded with families out for the weekend afternoons. Some 500 of them filled the Ballroom for two free piano recitals, each with interviews followed by large queues for ritual CD signing, each purchaser duly photographed with the artist...
Simon Trpceski was promoting his new Debussy disc and did so qute unassumingly in a programme aimed towards the small children in the audience, one of whom stole the scene dancing impromptu in perfect rhythm to the Golliwog's Cake Walk. He introduced his selection, beginning quietly and modestly with Prokofiev's Tales of an Old Grandmother, Op 31, following with Debussy's Children's Corner and finishing with one of the Arabesques and L'isle joyeuse. Then he talked about his early life in Macedonia and his determination to find a just balance between concertising and the other sides of life; "I always smile". He answered questions including about the notorious 2000 competition in London, For a second recital, to launch Gabriela Montero's latest CD, the amplification was turned up for a formidable pianist (endorsed by Martha Argerich as her successor...) to storm through the Liszt Mephisto Waltz 3 before improvising in many different musical styles to familiar tunes chosen from the audience, a skill not often displayed by classical pianists. Quickly via the extraordinary 1898 Waterloo & City train link for a different musical world, Brian Ferneyhough at St Luke's. The culmination of a residency at Kingston University, he was present with a smallish audience to hear the Arditti String Quartet give a rare performance of his own Quartet No 3 (1987) and a new Exordium for Elliott Carter's centenary this year. The latter is a concentrated sequence of "forty independent fragments" lasting 6 and a half minutes, very winning and, indeed for me, more accessible than most of Carter's own dense middle-period music... Also presented were an impenetrable (to me) modernistic new quartet by Roger Redgate and Impacts & Fractures, reflecting on a road accident suffered by Paul Archbold (composer and sound engineer for Colin Still's innovative Ferneyhough DVD, which was selling there like hot cakes). Of several student pieces chosen from 10 workshopped at Kingston, I failed to latch on to one by a sometime contributor to This interesting concert will be broadcst on BBC R3's Hear and Now on 12 April Peter Grahame Woolf |
in which he was beaten in bizarre circumstances by a substitute finalist who had not even been shortlisted! But his agent found him there and thereafter he's never looked back...
Musical Pointers (who I did not indentify correctly until he took his bow because of confusion within the programmes and leaflets supplied; we were reprimanded from the platform because our programmes were 'noisy' and we oughtn't to be looking at them !...) Those more accessible and enjoyable for me were a Bergian/Webernish piece by Michael Graubart (who turned out to be a Viennese refugee nearly my own age) and Seven White Flowers, a sensuously beautiful and undogmatic piece by Nadja Plein, whose