Piotr Anderszewski is celebrating his 50th birthday with a Wigmore Hall programme on 3 May of music by the three composers with whom he is most closely identified – Bach, Schumann and Beethoven. But he warmed up for the recital with chamber music, joining the Belcea Quartet for Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet.
The spirit of Bach informed that performance, not only in the opening prelude, with its stately baroque beginning and the whispered fugue following it, but in the many passages in which the textures are thinned down to become two- or three-part inventions. Anderszewski brought his familiar unfussy clarity to such writing, and added fierceness and even venom, especially in the spiky rhythms of the scherzo and the main theme of the finale, while the biggest climaxes carried fearsome weight and intensity.
It was the first time I had heard mainstream chamber music in the Queen Elizabeth Hall since its reopening last year, and the sound seemed much brighter and more forward than before. That had been even more obvious in the first half of the concert than it was during the Shostakovich, for the two quartets Belcea played had an almost superreal level of definition. In Haydn’s G major Quartet, Op 33 No 5, that emphasised the subtleties of their performance – how nothing was overstated and especially how vibrato was controlled, with none at all in the second-movement largo. But in Janáček’s Intimate Letters quartet, the effect was much less convincing; the performance acquired an aggressive, sometimes snarling edge, which would have seemed more appropriate to middle-period Bartók, while the lyrical writing received rather short shrift.
