I.

Evening All Afternoon - Donmar Warehouse

The actress Anastasia Hille has been playing lead roles in eminent London theatres for over thirty years. She’s even played Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth for two different British companies - in the last century at the National Theatre opposite Alan Howard, in this century with Cheek by Jowl opposite Will Keen. She’s also played Aeschylus, other Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Pinter, Albee - at the National Theatre, with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, in the West End, at the Royal Court, at the Young Vic, at the Donmar Warehouse, at the Almeida. Although she looks - with her wide mouth and her pointed nose - like Osbert Lancaster’s posh-English cartoon character Maudie Littlehampton, she comes across very differently, with many facets between vulnerability and steeliness. Her voice, with an English nasal resonance like a less acidic Maggie Smith’s, has sometimes been underpowered and under-projecting - but the opposite has also been true. So you never quite know who Hille will be in each role, or how successful.

You don’t expect a former Clytemnestra and Lady Macbeth to excel in a role devoid of attack, but in “Evening All Afternoon”, a new play running at the Donmar Warehouse until April 11, that’s what happens. Hille plays the entirely diffident Jennifer, the white English second wife of the repeatedly absent John, whose first wife, now dead, was Jamaican-born. As written by Anna Ziegler, most of “Evening All Afternoon” consists of alternating soliloquies for Jennifer and Dalilah (Erin Kellyman), white stepmother and Black stepdaughter. As each woman talks - Diyan Zora directs - we hear how much each woman was shaped by her now dead mother. The difference between these two characters, even though Dalilah comes to live under Jennifer’s roof, is so pronounced that it’s like shuttling between two very different plays; and the plot lies in their failures to understand each other. Delilah, speaking with an American accent, is tragically haunted by enduringly vivid memories of her Jamaican mother; Jennifer, often funny without even meaning to be, is comically well-meaning, anxious about her stepdaughter without spotting some obvious aspects of her malaise, fabulously lacking in self-assertiveness. It’s tempting to wish the play’s psychological aspects were more fully developed - and yet part of the play’s tension and comedy arises from what these women fail to know or understand. (“Evening all afternoon”, the words of the title, comes from Wallace Stevens’s poem “Thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird”.)

Hille and Kellyman act in completely different styles, as befits the play, both admirably. It’s likely that their performances will develop as the play’s run continues, but on press night Hille was already marvellous - hilarious, anxious, endearingly diffident. Her diffidence is evident in her closed body language and the bottles-up sound of her voice. How wonderful to see this actress in a role so surprisingly good for her. 

II.

Piotr Andreszewski - Wigmore Hall

Playing at the Wigmore Hall on Friday 27 February, the Polish pianist Piotr Andreszewski began by playing a selection of ten Brahms intermezzi, interspersed with one Capriccio and one Rhapsody, all as if improvising. His amalgam of spontaneity, imagination, and inwardness is entrancing: it reveals Brahms and Andrezewski at the same time. We’re deep in the introspective aspects of Romanticism here: we can hear how Brahms has drawn strength from the impromptus of Schubert and Chopin. 

In his programme’s second half, Andreszewski played Beethoven’s famous sonata no 33, opus 111 - in the same improvisatory spirit. The proto-jazz sound of the second movement’s third variation, much discussed, was strongly felt here - but as Beethoven and Andreszewski moved on, it was marvellous to feel that, for these artists, music is all alchemy: an art of transformation. (The Wigmore Hall website says that, as an encore, Andreszewski played the first of Beethoven’s six minuets WoO. 10, in C major; but I am among those who heard Andreszewski announce it as one of Beethoven’s bagatelles.)

III.

Paavo Järvi and the London Philharmonic 

On Tuesday 3, the London Philharmonic Orchestra announced that the Estonian-American conductor Paavo Järvi is to become, from 2028 onwards, its next principal conductor, succeeding the younger Edward Gardiner, who has held the position since 2021. There is already debate about whether Järvi’s repertory preferences are preferable to Gardner’s, but let’s see how those emerge. 

Certainly the LPO is in very good shape just now. (I know of no British orchestra whose brass section makes a stronger impact.) And certainly Järvi made it sound sensational in a knockout programme at the Festival Hall on Wednesday 4 - a double bill of Tchaikovsky’s second piano concerto and Sibelius’s second symphony. The pianist was the French Alexandre Kantorow, who gave thunder-and-lightning accounts of the concerto’s outer movements and a luminous one of the andante second piano movement. In a concerto. Much of the piano’s role in those first and third movements is in spectacular cadenzas; the rapid-fire density of Kantorow’s playing was astounding. But Tchaikovsky was at his most unorthodox in the andante second movement, making the piano one of three solo voices, often sharing material with the first violin and the first cello. (The solos for violin and cello are omitted in the posthumous 1897 edition by Tchaikovsky’s former student Alexander Siloti, which is still used in George Balanchine’s widely performed 1941 ballet “Ballet Imperial”, also titled “Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto no 2”.) Järvi and Kantorow ensured that these trios were object lessons of eloquent responsiveness. 

As an encore, Kantorow played a piano arrangement (by Mikhail Pletnev?) of the colossal adagio of the Sugarplum pas de deux from Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker”. I hope we hear much more of this amazing pianist. 

The dynamic contrasts of Sibelius’s second symphony became thrilling under Järvi’s direction. How often the phrases and subsections of the second movement end with pauses and stops! - only for the music’s larger thought soon to regather momentum. Every section of the orchestra rose to the occasion.

IV.

The Sixteen - Bach and Byrd 

On Thursday 5, the Sixteen, conducted by Harry Christophers, gave an evening of Bach and Byrd. I never wanted less Bach- the two main events were the cantatas “Herr, deine Augen sehem nach dem Glauben” (BWV102) and “Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal” (BWV146) - but I did want more Byrd than the two anthems we were given (“Emendemus in melius” and “Turn our captivity, O Lord”). Too few of the singers were good soloists when it came to pointing words and projecting legato vocal lines; but in the Bach cantata “Wir müssen durch viel Trübsal” (BWV146), the tenor Matthew Long was a marvel of verbal and vocal clarity. All the ensembles were glories of sensuous complexity, with singers and instrumentalists coalescing in ravishing tapestries.

<Published in “Slipped Disc”, March 6 , 2026>

@Alastair Macaulay