I went to two more concerts in the Mozartfest. Firstly Alisdair Beatson played a song-inspired programme in the Guildhall. The centrepiece was Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy. I’m not sure I’d ever heard this live before. It was played with great vigour and virtuosity, though the quieter passages also came over with a lovely sense of line. The recital opened with Mozart’s variations on Gluck’s “Unser dummer Pöbel meint” K 455, and continued with Liszt’s arrangements of Du bist die Ruh’ and Gretchen am Spinnrade and Schumann’s Widmung. The encore was a Valse-Caprice by Fauré, unkown to me. Overall the emphasis was on fluency and tempi were on the fast side.
Another blogger reviews the recital here.
Later I was present at the Jerusalem Quartet’s Saturday morning concert, having been offered a press seat as compensation for the missed advertised benefits of Friendship of the Mozartfest. I enjoy Saturday morning as a time-slot, perhaps because I feel more alert then than on, say, a weekday evening. The concert opened with a relative rarity, Wolf’s Italian Serenade, a piece which is rather hard to place if you don’t know who wrote it. Paul Meyer joined them for Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet, complementing the sound of the quartet admirably, rather than turning the piece into a scaled down clarinet concerto as some performers like to do. The concert ended with Brahms’ quartet in B flat. What one really gets from this quartet is overall beauty of sound and a complete balance between the players. The large though not capacity audience loved it.