Seven centuries of music at the Wigmore Hall - and a Scottish “Mary, Queen of Scots”

I:    András Schiff and Chloe Jiyeong Mun, Friday 6 March

The master-pianist András Schiff is at a stage where he often only discloses what he’ll play when his concerts have been announced, and when he can explore lesser-known repertory.

On Friday 6th March, he and Chloe Jiyeong Mun gave an evening of Schubert duets, with the intensely civilised Schiff speaking into a hand-microphone to introduce each number or each group. His voice is soft, his manner gentle;  his words are a happy mixture of intelligence and feeling.

Endearingly, Jiyeong Mun and he took turns to sit at the upper end of the piano. This was an evening of music-making and music-sharing, with neither pianist ever having great solo opportunities. Schubert composed much more often in the duet form than did Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven: this tells us much about him – as it tells us much about Schiff that he gives time to playing a wide range of these duets.

Only one of these duets is known to more or less all musical people: the Fantaisie in F minor D 940, from Schubert’s final year. Its renown is deserved. From the tender delicacy of its opening phrase, it manages at the same time to be eloquent and ineffable, poignant and consoling. And it goes on to spring structural surprise upon surprise. Even when it returns to that opening phrase, the timing takes you aback.

Schiff’s choice of other Schubert duets covered a marvellous range. Although he spoke of the importance of humour in music, he admitted that it’s not a quality in which Schubert abounds. Nonetheless he and Jiyeong Hun closed with numbers he felt showed just that humour: the two Marches Caractéristiques D 886.

II:   Elisabeth Leonskaja, Thursday 12 March

Schiff, a Hungarian who has chosen to live in London, is in his early seventies; Elisabeth Leonskaja, a Georgian who has elected to live in Vienna, is eighty. Yet she, playing at the Wigmore Hall six days later, brings to her playing a quality of inspired Titanic energy that reinvigorates her music, while shaping each phrase with wonderful plasticity. She played Beethoven (Fantasia in G minor Op. 77), Schoenberg (Six Little Piano Pieces Op. 19), Chopin (Scherzo No. 1 in B minor Op. 20; Nocturne No. 8 in D flat Op. 27 No. 2; and Polonaise-fantaisie in A flat Op. 61), Webern (Variations op.27), and Schubert (Piano Sonata in A minor D845).

Although she vividly showed the individual style of each, her playing suggested that Schubert, Chopin, Schoenberg, and Webern each followed Beethoven in infusing the classical tradition with new qualities of radical experimentation. The pauses and changes of tack inBeethoven’s op.77 sonata became high-drama stream of consciousness: as his use of a single-note descending phrase – played with slow pealing-bell beauty – came round again and again, she made it feel like a wipe effect in cinema. The pauses she takes between movements are very short; she plays whole sonatas like single but infinitely complex unfolding thoughts.

With Leonskaja, it’s clear that the modernism of Schoenberg and Webern is a sequel to the Romantic imagination of the earlier composers. She is never doggedly schematic about this: her three Chopin pieces strongly suggested that this composer kept finding new paths.

As her encore, she looped this vision of tradition one stage further back, with the Andante of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in C K545. This is Mozart at his most seemingly simple, but Leonskaja, at the end of such a programme, made it sound like a profound affirmation of lyricism.

III:   The Elias String Quartet, in Beethoven string quartets, March 10, 13, and 15

The Elias quartet consists of three woman and one man: they play with wonderful responsiveness and spontaneity. I wish their attire were more coordinated: the cellist’s voluminous shocking-pink trousers twice worn by the cellist were distracting. In a series of three Beethoven evenings, they chose programmes that ranged chronologically between early, middle, and late periods.  The first violinist, Sara Bitlloch, plays – my companion remarked – like a singer: rapturous. All play with zest, incisiveness, energy.

Every quartet left people exclaming about Beethoven’s radical experimentation: the sudden pauses and stops; the astonishing changes of speed and of tack; the seeming false starts that make a different sense later on; the many different co-originations of four players, sometimes seeming at first as if at cross purposes. Two centuries have passed, with most subsequent composers creating in Beethoven’s wake, and yet still the audacity and innovation of his thought, in these quartets even more than elsewhere, remains breathtaking.

IV:    International Women’s Day, March 8

To mark International Women’s Day (March 8), soprano Nardus Williams and lutanist Elizabeth Kenny

presented an evening of Italian music composed by women in the Renaissance and early baroque eras – with the feminist and classicist Mary Beard as speaker and presenter. To have just songs by seven eminently individual women from the 1500s and 1600s was impressive – chronologically spanning from Isabella de’ Medici (1542-1576) to Rosa Giacinta Badalla (c.1660-c.1710) – though I’d like to have been given a larger picture. Did many women compose music in the Renaissance? How many of them were musical professionals – or how many of them were aristocrats with spare time in which to write music? Did they specialise in songs or did they also compose in other genres?

Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677), alone, was represented by five songs. (Williams sang two by the earlier Francesca Caccini.) Certainly Strozzi is marvellously diverse, but how widely known (and how widely published) was she in her time? I’m among the many who know too little about the answers to these questions.

To round the programme off and bring it up to date, they ended by presenting the world premiere of Errollyn Wallen’s setting of Carol Ann Duffy’s poem “Eurydice”, which dramatises the moment of Orpheus’s fatal choice to look back too soon at his wife – making it clear that Eurydice urged him to do so, and making it very possible that she did do out of tiredness of being his muse rather than being known as having any life without him. I enjoy and applaud Duffy’s thought, though without being much taken by her wording; and I find Wallen agreeable but forgettable. Were the Renaissance and early baroque era the greatest period for a women composers? (If so, why?)

Nardus Williams, tall and handsome, sings these songs with a very pleasing purity, whose expressive aspects become subtly apparent. She doesn’t impose on her music; she reveals it and allows it to cast its spell. Elizabeth Kenny plays both lute and theorbo. (Both women joined Beard In speaking a fragment of Aristophanes’s feminist comedy “Lysistrata”.) It’s to be hoped this programme becomes the first of a larger series.

V:    Hugh Cutting, March 9

It’s impressive to hear how the young countertenor Hugh Cutting keeps developing. In his concert with the Irish Baroque concert on March 9, the top of his voice had gained in size and his coloratura in dramatic power, notably in arias from Mozart’s “Mitridate”. The programme – it has been touring – was named “The Trials of Tenducci”,focusing on the castrato Giusto Fernando Tenducci (c.1735-1790), who spent much of his prime in London and Dublin, and the repertory that Tenducci sang here by Arne, Johann Christian Bach (“the London Bach”), and Mozart.

This was an intelligent, stimulating programme that enlightened us about Tenducci and about other European musicians active in the London and Dublin of his day – but it was the least engaging concert by Cutting I’ve heard. His diction has grown more covered, his consonants have lost bite. The charm of his physical presence and stage manners remain, but just now he fails to enthrall.

VI:     Michael Finnissy’s eightieth birthday, March 13

Although it’s over forty years since first I discovered the music of composer Michael Finnissy (his Verdi transcriptions for piano), I was surprised to find that he is now eighty years old. The guitarist Sam Cave celebrated the occasion with a lunchtime concert at the Wigmore Hall, playing four different kinds of guitar in music by Finnissy and five other living composers, all younger than Finnissy, three of whom were present.

One impressive discovery was how Finnissy has influenced other composers, and how Cave has worked with them to extend the guitar technique and guitar sonorities. Finnissy’s own two works, coming from 1966 and 2021, handsomely showcased his own range and growth.

VII:    Scottish Ballet’s “Mary Queen of Scots”, March 7

Over recent decades, various aspects of the tale of Mary Queen of Scots have kept reaching the stage, often with Mary and Elizabeth I sharing the same space as they never did in life. I’m sorry I never saw Robert Bolt’s play “Vivat, Vivat Regina”, but over the decades I’ve seen the Maries of Janet Baker, Joan Sutherland, Isabelle Huppert, Janet McTeer, Joyce DiDonato, Sondra Radvanovsky, Lia Williams, opposite the Elizabeths of Pauline Tinsley, Ava June, Rosalind Plowright, Huguette Tourangeau, Anna Massey, Harriet Walter, Elza van der Heever, Juliet Stevenson. For her company’s 1979 Covent Garden season, Martha Graham revived her 1958 one-act “Episodes” (to Webern music), in which the battle royal between the two queens became a stylised game of tennis (without balls).

Scottish Ballet came to Sadler’s Wells to perform its new production of “Mary Queen of Scots” for one week (March 4-7), to enthusiastic houses. I wish I could have joined the enthusiasm. By telling us in writing which character is which, and then turning subtleties of politics and psychology into physical sensationalism, Sophie Laplane’s choreography (she has co-created the ballet with the director James Bonas) excites part of the audience: I’m afraid I found all the movement obvious, crude, the more so in relation to the often ambiguous historical situations being depicted. The most memorable section is not for Mary or Elizabeth: it’s a duet in which Mary’s second husband Darnley has an aggressive duet with Mary’s Italian musical courtier Rizzio – a duet that soon turns sexual (but far from amorous). The music is composed by Mikael Karlsson and Michael P. Atkinson.

There are worse ballets than this. I could usually tell who was who; what was going on was usually more or less apparent. But depth, nuance, detail: these were in short supply. By comparison to any of the several stagings of “Mary Stuart” as play or opera, this was crass. It’s symptomatic of British dance that such tawdry fare is taken seriously by more than a few.

@Alastair Macaulay 2026