Pianist James Baillieu is a featured artist at the Wigmore Hall this season, mostly in duo with a series of similarly young singers. Not much chance on such a small stage, one would think, of hearing him in play in the spotlight as a concerto soloist – but that would be to reckon without Mozart’s own arrangement for piano and string quartet of his Concerto in A, K414.
His partners were the fast-rising Heath Quartet, who were on stage for the whole of a concert that began with more Mozart and finished with Elgar’s masterly Piano Quintet. As for that spotlight, it was not entirely in focus. Mozart’s arrangement of the concerto effectively reimagines it as a quintet, with all that implies. Tucked away behind the strings as per standard quintet layout, and playing a piano of particularly soft-grained tone, Baillieu seemed less a star soloist than an unusually busy cog in the quintet machine. His playing, fluid and elegant, needed a touch more personality in order to leap out from the back of the stage.
The string players approached the concerto with a gentle, transparent sound that would have gone a long way in Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C minor, which opened the concert. Instead, as the forthright Fugue subject was relentlessly passed around the instruments, the richness of their competing lines made the piece seem noisy.
That thickness of tone was more effectively used in the Elgar, especially the second movement, launched by Gary Pomeroy with a strong and beautiful viola melody. This is the music the composer asked to hear on his deathbed. Baillieu and the Heath players shaped its gradually building and subsiding climaxes convincingly, and twice captured the feeling of time slowing down that Elgar writes into the music; but in the most frenzied moments the string tone grew edgy, and the performance smoothed out some of the work’s mercurial energy.
