Judging from the near-capacity audience for his recital, and the enthusiastic reception for it, Benjamin Grosvenor is now firmly established as one of Wigmore Hall’s favourites. His latest programme – works by Busoni, Schumann, Ravel and Prokofiev – contained none of the virtuoso showpieces that used to be such a regular feature of his recitals, though there were still plenty of technical challenges of the kind that he takes in his stride.
Le Tombeau de Couperin was perhaps the nearest thing to purely decorative music in the selection, though Grosvenor’s take on Ravel’s piano music is never as pastel-coloured and exquisite as it’s sometimes presented, but something much more sinewy and direct, even in these exercises in nostalgia. He would return to Ravel for his encore, too, with Jeux d’Eau, in a performance that owed as much to Liszt as it did to any notion of musical impressionism.
But a first half of Busoni’s transcription of the great Chaconne from Bach’s D minor violin Partita, and Schumann’s C major Fantasie Op 17 was powerful stuff. The Chaconne was a tremendous opener, given a performance of immense muscularity and power that swept all before it, and that intensity was carried over into the Fantasie. That work needs a bit more than sheer power though, and at times Grosvenor’s reading would sometimes have benefited from more transparent textures and a less assertive bass and even a little more affection in its lyrical interludes, while the treacherous closing pages of the central march were not quite as immaculate as one might have expected from such a technically gifted pianist.
But Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata, the central panel in his wartime sonata triptych, received exactly the fierce, driven performance it demands, only pausing for breath in the slow movement, with its allusions to a song from Schumann’s Op 39 Liederkreis, and Grosvenor’s virtuosity didn’t miss anything in the final, tumultuous toccata.
