I had another packed weekend in London at the end of January 2020 / beginning of February with Mitsuko Uchida as pianist and director of the Gustav Mahler Chamber Orchestra performing Mozart Piano Concerto No. 17, K453, Widmann’s Choralquartett , and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22, K. 482. This was just about as superlative as it gets – definitely one of my high 5 stars for the decade. Mitsuko as a player was nuanced, sensitive, made every note count and making every note both live and be placed, clear and lyrical – words fail to me. And as an encore, a superlative account of a Schubert Impromptu. It can’t get much better than this, I thought (and for the rest of the year it didn’t)…..
And – as if this was not enough – the next day was Wagner’s Siegfried, part of the projected LPO Jurowski Ring cycle, meant to have been rolled out in Feb 2021 (I had tickets, grrrrr, but which has now been abandoned because of COVID). This was very good, with a few reservations . The good bits first: – the orchestra and Jurowski were superb – fastish tempi but not too hard-driven and giving an appropriate sense both of menace in Act 2 and grandeur at the beginning of Act 3; Adrian Thompson (I found myself sitting next to him over lunch having another meeting on something else entirely and wondering who he was) was a superb Mime. Elena Pankratova , who I heard as Kundry at Bayreuth in 2017, was an outstanding Brunnhilde (with the oddity that she chose not to sing the optional High C at the end of Act 3, which was a bit offputting). Robert Hayward as Alberich and Brindley Sherratt as Fafner did all that was required of them. Some of the critics seemed to have it in for Evgeny Nikitin as the Wanderer, but, speaking personally, I loved the sonorities of his voice, even if his acting was a bit wooden. The main questionmark was over Torsten Kerl as Siegfried – his physical presence would have been less of a concern if this had been a fully concert-based performance, but, as is common these days, ‘concert performance’ seems to now mean a modicum of acting, and, let us say, acting Siegfried is not Kerl’s strong point. On the positive side I found his singing sensitive at points and – at the end of the day – he was still there at the end of the third act, belting forth, and doing the top note that Pankratova opted opted out of – so kudos to him. I wasn’t that taken by the elements of staging or the video design.
And on the Sunday I had a reunion lunch with an old friend, in memory of another friend who died in 2013 – RIP, Mick
John's musical journey 