I attended two piano recitals during the Bath Festival. The first was Freddy Kempf playing Beethoven and Chopin in a programme consisting entirely of music I have known well for a long time. I wasn’t very happy with the performances, especially of the Beethoven, because of a tendency to pound the keyboard and some peculiar rubato. I felt that he was best in the gentler passages of the Chopin (Op. 25 Études), where there was no temptation to be aggressive. At least he repeated the introduction in the first movement of the Pathétique sonata. (The other work in the programme was the Appassionata). I should add that most of the audience seemed to like the recital more than I did.
A week later I returned to the Assembly Rooms to hear Angela Hewitt play. I’m now used enough to Bach on the harpsichord that I don’t feel quite at ease with performances on the piano as a rule, though these won me over. She made light of the difficulties of playing on a different instrument, such as the abrupt changes of dynamic required in the absence of a second manual in the French Overture. After the interval she played Ravel’s Sonatine and Liszt’s Sonata. Again the Sonata is a work I know and love very well. Even if you hadn’t known that Hewitt’s a Bach specialist, you might have guessed it from the relish with which she attacked the fugal section! My only reservation was that I found some of the slower passages dragged a bit and as a result the internal argument of the sonata was broken up.
My husband went to hear the Hagen Quartet. The major work in their recital was Beethoven’s op. 135 (I heard the same quartet play this work in the Wigmore Hall a few years ago); he enjoyed the performances but found the programming unsatisfactory, in that the final work was a relatively minor composition by Schumann which didn’t really stand up to comparison with the rest of the programme.