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While other music venues more or less shut up shop into the New Year, Wigmore Hall keeps music playing throughout. There was barely a seat to be had for these two piano recitals, threats of snow and a transport strike notwithstanding.
At 25, Alim Beisembayev is rapidly making a name for himself. Born in Kazakhstan, a student until last year of the Royal College of Music in London, he won the Leeds International Piano Competition in 2021. His winning performance came in Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and Rachmaninov came up again for his Proms debut last year, so it is clear where his artistic heart lies.
His Wigmore Hall programme was a big one. The first half consisted of two Beethoven sonatas — the “Appassionata” and Op 110 in A Flat — in which he gave the Wigmore’s Steinway quite a workout. This was big-boned playing that projected the tempestuous outbursts of the “Appassionata” on a thunderous scale. Ideally, the classical side of the sonatas would feel more present, with a judicious sense of balance and sharply defined rhythms, but in the heat of the moment the Romantic sweep of Beisembayev’s performances carried all before it.
The second half opened with Scriabin’s Four Preludes, Op 22, each of which quickly established its own atmosphere. A contrasting pair by Rachmaninov — the elegiac Prelude in B Minor, Op 32 No 10, and the Etude-tableau Op 39 No 9 — brought back the wealth of colours that distinguish Beisembayev’s Rachmaninov, the counterpoint of the Etude-tableau not an exercise in clarity, but part of a seething flow of movement. From there to Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit was a small step from one showpiece to another, any shortage of detail compensated by the tonal beauty of the water-sprite “Ondine” and the devilish panache of the goblin “Scarbo”.
★★★★☆
Three days later, Boris Giltburg was at Wigmore Hall for a similarly involving recital. Born in Russia, though emigrating as a child to Israel, he is no mean Rachmaninov pianist himself, with fine recordings of the concertos and solo works to his name, emotion and elegance held in balance.
He also put Scriabin on the programme, opening his recital with the Piano Sonata No 2, a two-movement “Sonata Fantasy” which rippled with colours. There is a quickness of reaction in Giltburg’s playing, with fleeting shades of light and dark, that worked well in the unstable world of Schumann’s Kreisleriana. At full volume, the sound here became a touch forced, without the symphony-orchestra richness of Beisembayev, but otherwise Giltburg keeps more air in his playing and that allowed the quixotic changes of mood in Schumann’s unpredictable series of eight pieces to register with flair.
Everything came together in a high-wire performance of Chopin’s contemporaneous Four Scherzos, agile, virtuoso, still with clarity in the welter of notes, even when Giltburg was pushing the pace as the musical summits came into view. A breather was needed after that and his encore turned to the nocturnal hush of Debussy’s “Clair de lune”, lit by the very softest of moonbeams.
★★★★☆
