Recitals involving the keyboard giants Stephen Kovacevich and Martha Argerich are regular and unmissable events in the London calendar around this time of year. The former celebrated his 85th birthday last Friday, adding an extra frisson to last night’s occasion.
Kovacevich began with a group of Brahms’s late miniatures: four intermezzi and a capriccio from opp. 116 and 118. These delightful pieces are known for their withdrawn, self-communing nature. In them, Brahms largely abjures the heroic, virtuoso gestures of his earlier period. Kovacevich has been playing them for many years: his 1994 recording is a benchmark, albeit one characterised by a contrast between aggressively fiery capriccios and tender intermezzi. Three decades on, the musculature and arm-weight are not what they once were: hence, no doubt, the preponderance of intermezzi here.
But Kovacevich continues to seek the soul of these deeply introspective pieces. The inner world he now conjures, with generous use of both pedals, is veiled, impressionistic and often magical. There were fifty shades of pianissimo here: fortunately this was an exemplarily attentive audience. With phrases frequently overlapping and some notes disappearing altogether, these were readings that distilled the essence of late Brahms.
In the performance of Beethoven’s penultimate sonata, op. 110 in A flat, that followed, the blazing intensity of Kovacevich’s earlier Beethovenian style was superseded by a markedly intimate, restrained account that took us into another world of enchantment, the fugue subject finally emerging not as statement but as hazy, pensive incertitude.
Kovacevich was then joined by the fine French artist Irène Duval for Brahms’s Violin Sonata no. 1 in G major. The lyrical warmth from both players in this most inward of Brahms’s violin sonatas engendered some exquisite moments, especially in the slow movement.
Argerich – only a year Kovacevich’s junior – finally made her appearance, alas only for the last two items. But with Debussy’s En Blanc et Noir, featuring Kovacevich at the second piano, there was a transformation in terms of rhythmic vitality and coruscating ton, with superbly judged interplay between the duo. Kovacevich then opened the two-piano arrangement of the same composer’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune with an astonishingly pedalled rendition of the flute solo that certainly evoked the sultry languorous mood of Mallarmé’s poem. And it was in this final piece that the music-making at last touched sublimity with a textural richness and intuitive interweaving that perhaps only these two superlative artists could achieve.
All was not yet over. But instead of the hoped-for encore our indulgence was craved for some patching, for a BBC recording, of a few bars from the violin sonata. After which, Kovacevich made two further heavily pedalled attempts at the fugue subject from the Beethoven sonata, before taking his leave with a resigned shrug. One looks forward to next year’s offering with impatience and some bemusement.
Wigmore Hall; wigmore-hall.org.uk
