BACH Prelude & Fugue in C from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I; SCHUMANN Ten Impromptus on a Theme by Clara Wieck Op.5; PROKOFIEV Visions fugitives; BYRD Fantasia in A minor; LIGETI Etude No.10 Der Zauberlehrling; SCHUBERT Fantasie in C Wanderer Fantasy. Mishka Rushdie Momen (piano)
This was my first live concert in nearly 6 weeks. I’d decided to cancel some concerts and operas in London because of the surge in Omicron cases before and after Christmas. Three of the shows I missed I’m not that bothered about having not gone to them – the ROHCG dress rehearsal for Nabucco, the Marriage of Figaro there and the LSO /Karabits Mahlder 4, but one – the Barbican Lise Davidsen recital – got very good reviews and I was sorry not to hear it. I’m also missing out on the dress-rehearsal of ENO’s La Boheme and one of the Jerusalem Quartet’s Beethoven quartet cycle concerts at the Wigmore Hall. But other than these it’s back to live performances….!!
This was a clever bit of programming (a common theme being ‘Fantasies’ of one kind or another – and Ms Mome is clearly an up-and-coming artist, now in her late 20’s, and with a lot of international as well as UK experience. I am not a pianist, and some of what I say below should be read with a fair degree of caution. But – as I hear it, and for what it’s worth – she offers very precise, clear and accurate playing, with maybe a smallish tone – not much thundering here – and presented in particular a quite phenomenal clarity in the upper areas of the keyboard. The most enjoyable playing was the Wanderer Fantasy which is a great enough piece to accommodate a whole range of stylistic approaches, and I thought this went very well – some beautiful playing in the more lyrical song-based parts, and tremendous logic and attack in the final movement. I also thought the Prokofiev Visions Fugitive went well – this was a piece I’d never heard before, which offered 20 short vignettes, many of them sounding like ghostly, splendid, Tsarist balls, the noble dancers gradually fading into nothingness. At times it sounded like Debussy, even though I believe it was written before Prokofiev settled in Paris. I loved too the clarity and freshness of the Ligeti piece, and the quirky Byrd, its different episodes nicely differentiated.
The Schumann, I’m afraid, had me dropping off to sleep (Schumann often does that to me) and I can’t comment. The one piece I thought didn’t go too well was the Mozart. I can’t quite put my finger on the issue – it was something about phrasing and the gaps between the notes. There seemed to be a dull silence between notes rather than the anticipation of the next one and aftertaste of the last. Does that mean she should have used more pedal – I’m not sure, but it seemed somehow to skate over the surface a little and somehow the subtlety wasn’t there – a bit one-dmensional.
John's musical journey 