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Mitsuko Uchida, Royal Festival Hall, London

Edward Seckerson
Thursday 21 May 2009 11:31 BST
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Mitsuko Uchida loves to journey in her recitals; but it’s the connections she makes on the way – intellectually, psychologically, emotionally – that throw up the most telling insights.

Her signature Mozart is always a good place to start and in this instance the Rondo in A minor seemed literally to have been taken out of the air. The hushed melancholy of the theme, so deftly turned on graceful semi-quavers, had nothing to do with fingers on keys or hammers on strings – rather it levitated as if to suggest Mozart among the angels, and each return on this short journey brought renewed wonder and, more importantly, new departures.

Fast forward, then, 160 years to a very different Vienna as Uchida made Viennese haiku of Webern’s Variations Op.27. One or two of them even sounded like short-hand Mozart, their cryptic poetry not for once lost in translation but exquisitely rendered like sonic ephemera vibrating for that moment only. Indeed, in raising our sonic awareness and sharpening our hearing for the Webern Uchida had primed us more than we knew for the Beethoven which followed – Sonata in A Op.101. How much richer and more mysterious its elemental colours now sounded, chords made cosmic by Uchida’s infinitely subtle weighing and testing of them. This is a big piece and there was always a healthy awareness – one might even say respect - in her performance that the music could quite easily overwhelm and consume her. It did not: inexorable power without force was the overriding impression.

And Uchida’s way with tension and release in the Beethoven went on to inform and enrich a quite magnificent performance of the Schumann Fantasy in C. In a piece teetering between euphoria and contemplation as this one does, a clear understanding of the emotional narrative is critical. One felt that Uchida had taken us to that secret place in Schumann’s troubled heart where deeper feelings, like those expressed in the second idea of the first movement, were simply left hanging and unresolved. Just as the impassioned love-song for Clara rashly and repeatedly swept all before it in the first movement, so the second movement march pointedly grew in confidence.

But more special still was the grave and inconsolable beauty of the third movement’s “song without words”. No words were necessary – the inwardness of the playing conveyed the deepest empathy. After which, the “non encore” of a Schoenberg piano piece so tiny as to be almost non-existent was like Uchida’s way of saying – we’ve had sufficient.

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