St Mary-le-Strand is a London church reborn. Anchored at the Aldwych amid a sea of traffic fumes and cut off on all sides by tides of cars, lorries and buses, it was almost inaccessible. Now imaginative town planning has replaced the roads with a wide piazza, freeing not just the church but also King’s College London and sumptuous Somerset House. Peace has descended. It’s the best thing that’s happened in the area for years.
Today you can step straight into James Gibbs’s 18th-century Italianate creation. Even in those days, it was beset by rumbling wagons and carriages, so Gibbs eschewed ground-floor nave windows to keep the congregation’s attention inside the building, thereby also creating a near-perfect space for music, a quality now recognised by pianist Warren Mailley-Smith. He has curated the new Strand international piano series that stretches into the summer, featuring some big names including Daniel Grimwood, Daniel Tong and John Lenehan. Mailley-Smith even bought the piano, a new Steinway model B.
A linking theme throughout the series are the preludes and fugues from Book 1 of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Last week, Murray McLachlan chose to open his recital with Nos 18 and 20, the preludes unwinding in calm, logical serenity, the delicate filigree of the fugues clear and untrammelled. He followed it with the London premiere of his own transcription of Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat major, Op 9 No 2 for left hand, written in homage to the great Chopin transcriber Leopold Godowsky. It’s a considerable feat, not least to keep the vocalise melody fluent while maintaining the waltz-like 12/8 engine purring beneath. It lost shape occasionally, but as a technical exercise it could hardly be bettered. Godowsky would surely approve.
The most intriguing piece on the programme proved to be Ronald Stevenson’s Fugue on a Fragment of Chopin (Ballade No 4). Written in 1949 while Stevenson was serving time in Wormwood Scrubs for refusing national service, this restless work takes a simple figure from the ballade and gives it a pummelling, turning it inside out and upside down in a thrilling explosion of anger that subsides and returns, vividly realised here by McLachlan.
He closed with a bravura performance of Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Op 28, with a particularly thunderous reading of No 22, the Molto agitato in G minor, which had me fearing for the health of that new Steinway. This exciting series continues next month with Yuki Negishi and Daniel Grimwood – if there’s anything left of the piano.
The death of Kit Hesketh-Harvey earlier this month has robbed us of an acerbic wit; one who was never shy of poking fun at middle-class pretensions. “We’re off to Glyndebourne, to watch a rather boring opera by Rossini,” was the opening line of one of his funniest songs, which takes its melody from the perky central theme in the overture to The Barber of Seville, an opera that, while ostensibly a comedy, can in the wrong hands become wearisomely formulaic. But no one could ever accuse directors Moshe Leiser and Patrice Caurier of taking a tedious approach to this Rossini classic. Their production bursts with colour and fun in its current revival at Covent Garden and features some seriously good singing.
The Russian mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina is simply stunning as a fiery Rosina, who thinks nothing of trashing the place when her plot to elope with her lover (a disguised Count Almaviva) looks to be thwarted. Her voice is a wonder: rich, ruby red right through the register, topped with an impressive coloratura. Those of us lucky enough to hear her in 2017 when she was starting out as a Jette Parker artist knew she would one day command the stage. That day has arrived.
Polish baritone Andrzej Filończyk is an irrepressible Figaro, making his entrance through the auditorium, scissors snipping at unwary heads in the audience. It’s a delightful performance, matched by Bryn Terfel as an oleaginous Don Basilio and Ailish Tynan as a truly funny Berta, while tenor Lawrence Brownlee dispatches Count Almaviva’s high-wire arias with ease. Making sense of all the mayhem is Venezuelan conductor Rafael Payare, in an impressive house debut.
I was stopped in my tracks last week by the creamy baritone of the German-Romanian Konstantin Krimmel, giving a lunchtime concert on Radio 3 from Wigmore Hall with pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz. My work in the kitchen had to cease (any excuse) as they presented a programme that included four delightfully piquant songs by Eusebius Mandyczewski (1857-1929), a Romanian friend of Brahms with a gift for limpid, nostalgic melody. The concert is broadcast again tomorrow lunchtime and available on BBC Sounds until 6 March. Put down that dishcloth and listen.
Star ratings (out of five)
Strand international piano series ★★★★
The Barber of Seville ★★★★
Konstantin Krimmel and Ammiel Bushakevitz ★★★★
The Barber of Seville is at the Royal Opera House, London, until 6 March, with a live stream in cinemas on 15 February (encore 19 February)
