Shakespeare, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Shaffer
I: Angela Hewitt at the Wigmore Hall
There are some dozen Shakespeare plays that each, when well staged, makes me think “No, this is his greatest play”. And there are some dozen pianists that have the same effect on me: “No, this player is the greatest”. Certainly I feel that way whenever I return to the playing of Angela Hewitt: miraculously lucid and multi-layered, miraculously subtly in her changes of pressure and tempo. She’s known for her particular devotion to Bach - I keenly remember the two glorious evenings she gave to “The Well-Tempered Clavier” at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall in 2019. This January her accounts of music by Bach, Rameau, and Scarlatti was wonderful, showing not just the individual character of each of those three contemporaries but the diversity of each too. But she has ranged into the music of Fauré and Debussy - and I’d like to hear her try more modern music yet.
On Thursday 4 at the Wigmore Hall she played Mozart (Sonata in B flat K570), Beethoven (Sonata No. 15 in D Op. 28 “Pastoral”), Schubert’s twelve Valses nobles (D969), Haydn’s Fantasia in C (HXVII/4), and Bach’s Partita No. 2 in C minor (BWV826). She was playing as part of the Wigmore Hall’s hundred-and-twenty-fifth anniversary season; It’s amazing to find that she made her Wigmore debut over forty years ago. The sheer elegance of her playing is unfailing: it’s a pleasure to watch the arcs made by whichever of her hands isn’t playing as well as the touch of each finger on the keys. Melody, harmony, rhythm: these basic components of music and musicianship. Somehow she retains spontaneity, even a subtle playfulness: you can see and feel how she listens for certain resolutions as if with an element of surprise.
II: “Black Comedy” at the Orange Tree
Peter Shaffer’s 1965 farce “Black Comedy” is one of the great British comedies of the twentieth century. It still entrances audiences with the originality of its central concept (the stage is blacked out when the characters have the lights on, there’s total lighting when they suffer a blackout, and the lights dim whenever they strike a match or switch a torch on). At the Orange Tree Theatre, where it’s running until July 11 and where I saw it on Friday June 5, you can hear how it holds its audience fast.
Even so, this is not a good account of the play. The German director Caroline Steinbeis has imposed a tight and exaggerated artificiality on all the actors, starting with Joe Bannister who’s never quite natural as the protagonist, the young sculptor Brindsley Miller. Steinbeis has chosen actors of colour for four of the other central characters. One of them, Patricia Allison, gives the most appealing performance of all, as Brindsley’s longterm lover Clea (though she’s the least good at looking and moving as if there were no lights on); but it’s hard to believe in Jason Barnett as the conservative Colonel (he overdoes everything) or Simon Manyonda, who simply misfires as the gay Northern antique-dealer Harold.
III: “The Tempest” in Stratford-upon-Avon
Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” can be the most elusive of plays: it’s certainly one of his twelve greatest, but it’s often frustrating in performance. In Richard Eyre’s new production for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-upon-Avon’s always actor-friendly Royal Shakespeare Theatre , however, it becomes marvellously lucid and, as designed by Bob Crowley, picturesque. (I caught the Saturday 6 matinee.) The dominant colours of Prospero’s isle are yellow (sun, Miranda, and often sky) and blue (sea, Prospero’s magic robes); but parts of the island are very much based on Henri Rousseau’s equatorial jungle, lush in large leaves and blooms.
Kenneth Branagh brings authority, experience, humanity, and thoughtfulness to the difficult central role of the magician Prospero. The production keeps us in constant suspense as to whether things onstage are happening according to Prospero’s plans or taking him by surprise; and his performance is at the centre of this suspense. He’s not one of your super-cerebral Prosperos, but his often very deliberate pacing of the lines makes us wonder how much he’s making this play about Prospero’s controlling art. I think he at times deprives the audience of one of his greatest gifts, his skill at speaking Shakespeare “trippingly, on the tongue” - he pauses too often between words - but he’s never too artful. At the end, when he speaks of life in Milan where “Every third thought will be my grave”, we feel how his own thoughts can still bring him up short.
Ariel is indeed always aerial, played by Amara Okareke on a travelling trapeze, only touching ground final when Prospero gives her freedom at the play’s end, and evidently unused to walking on the ground. Caliban is Ashley Zhangazha, always more articulate than the drunken Stephano (Guy Henry, wonderfully eccentric) and Trinculo (the sometimes too awkward Keir Charles). At the end, Prospero strongly implies he now makes Caliban ruler of the island and husband of Ariel - reconciling opposites.
Eyre has been one of our leading directors for decades, but this is his debut with the Royal Shakespeare Company; it beautifully catches Shakespeare’s multilayered art, now touching on matters of intellect and political power, now playing with both physical and verbal comedy. It’s not a great example of verse-speaking - it was fair to hope from more rhythmic subtlety from Branagh - but at every moment the play is marvellously alive.
It’s to be hoped that this production will come to London; I think Branagh’s already fine performance has some maturation ahead.
IV: Ian Bostridge and Piotr Anderzewski at the Wigmore Hall
Doubling back from Stratford-upon-Avon on Saturday 6, I was able to catch the second half of tenor Ian Bostridge’s recital with pianist Piotr Anderszewski. I was sorry to miss Bostridge’s account of Schumann’s “Liederkreis” (op.24); on arrival in the foyer, I heard some of the six Brahms intermezzi - six of the eleven that Anderzewski played there in February.
Bostridge looks more than ever like a sculpture by Giacometti: so tall and skinny that it’s bewildering. He’s wonderfully experienced in collaborating with leading pianists; always with him we’re aware of a keen mind, perpetually engaged with his music and words. He and Anderszewski gave “Dichterliebe” like a single thought, never pausing for a moment between songs. Although he’s vocally more stretched at top and bottom of his voice than years ago - he simply runs out of voice in the lowest notes - his voice still sounds wonderfully youthful, his phrasing shows a keener sense of line than ever, and he’s also less contrived in details of emphasis. In some lines, his diction is less clear than I remember; but not as a rule.
As encores, Anderszewski played one more Brahms intermezzo, after which - without a pause - Bostridge and he gave us Schubert’s “An die Musik”. How good to hear the humility and sincerity with which these artists ended here: dedicating themselves to music itself.
@Alastair Macaulay, 2026