The grand piano stands alone – lid open, the keyboard a gleaming row of sharks’ teeth. Slowly, deliberately, the pianist approaches, sits down and focuses concentration. Then with fingers flying, sonorous strings are brought to life, sounds swirling through the air… we enter the vivid, imaginative, even visionary, sometimes haunted realm of passionate piano music.
Romantic Piano brought together expressive, intimate, passionate and exciting music. In this special programme of works by three composer/pianists, Dr Robert Taub started with the stormy Pathétique Sonata of Beethoven, a proto-Romantic work that was an immediate hit: it sold out of its first printing almost immediately. Next was a set of highly personalised musical characterisations of an imaginary society by Schumann, his Davidsbündlertänze, with vivid musical symbolism of his yearning for his beloved Clara. The concert concluded with the thundering sonorities of Chopin’s mighty Sonata in B minor, the final of his three sonatas, composed five years before he died at age 39. Each work on this programme was deeply involving and expressive; the programme as a whole was a journey into the gripping soul of Romanticism.
This inaugural Musica Viva concert in Levinsky Hall promised an uplifting evening for all!