Pires/Gewandhaus/Chailly, Barbican, London, review: A magical evening of golden moments

Pianist Maria Joao Pires offered a sound of warm fullness and muscular expressiveness

Riccardo Chailly conducts the Gewandhausorchester (Mark Allan)

Too easy for children, too difficult for adults (as Artur Schnabel once said), Mozart’s piano music demands the highest artistry, and that’s what it got from Maria Joao Pires with the Gewandhausorchester under the direction of Riccardo Chailly. Pires’s sound had a warm fullness as she made her entry, but her expressiveness was muscular; switching into minor mode in the first movement’s development, she gave it a ceremoniousness which was blissfully devoid of anything fussy, and her cadenza seemed to grow organically out of what had gone before. The extreme simplicity of the Larghetto became in her hands magical: her performance made one realise anew how modern this work’s sonorities are, despite its austere economy of means.


 Maria Joao Pires gave Mozart’s piano the artistry that it demands 
 (Mark Allan)

The synergy which Chailly and his band found with their soloist was exemplary; in the Strauss tone-poems which comprised the rest of this concert they showed what a virtuoso bunch they are. They brought tremendous attack to Don Juan - one seldom hears so intensely vivid a meld of textures and timbres. In most conductors’ hands Ein Heldenleben becomes insufferably garrulous, but what Chailly did with that work was remarkable: letting it breathe until its high points - most notably an extraordinary violin solo – made a garland of golden moments.