‘Hopefully you didn’t come for banjos and guitars,” Francesco Turrisi quipped, seated at the Wigmore Hall’s grand piano. A ripple of laughter passed around the hall – which had sold out on the strength of the artists alone, with no hint of what they might perform. But then, when half of your duo is Rhiannon Giddens – multi-Grammy-winning folk singer and instrumentalist, MacArthur “genius” grant recipient and now a Pulitzer prize-winning composer to boot – the name is all it takes.
For this second concert in their Wigmore Hall residency, Giddens and long-time musical partner Turrisi asked a question: what might our version of a recital look like? The answer was an eclectic fusion with folk, opera, jazz, pop and classical elements all adding their accent to a traditional voice and piano concert – a performance “honouring composers who don’t often get called composers”.
