Pianist Steven Osborne and cellist Alban Gerhardt are, individually, musicians of the highest calibre. As a duo, they combine to achieve often breathtaking artistry. At St George’s, their pairing of a 19th-century German piece during the first half with 20th-century Spanish/French works in the second proved irresistible. The performance was full of expressive detail and ravishing colours.
They began with Schumann’s Fünf Stücke im Volkston Op 102, folk-style character pieces whose fluctuating moods were captured perfectly. The instruction in the third of the five is “mit viel Ton zu spielen”– to be played with much tone. In fact, it’s the infinite range of tonal gradation these performers find that so marks them out. Each is acutely responsive to the other and, with Gerhardt sitting right back in the curve of the piano, their enhanced visual contact affirmed the implicit sympathy. In Brahms’s F major Sonata, they brought out its drama as much as the lyricism, instinctively attuned to every nuance, and the affinity with Schumann emerged clearly.
Schumann’s pieces had an equivalent in Manuel de Falla’s Siete Canciones Populares Españolas in Maurice Maréchal’s arrangement for cello and piano. The Spanish and Moorish inflections – never overstated but sultry and sad in turn – were echoed in Osborne’s playing of Debussy’s solo Estampes, La Soirée en Granade in particular. That virtuosity was matched by Gerhardt joining him for works by Ravel – clever appropriations of the original versions of Alborada del Gracioso, Pièce en Forme de Habanera and Tzigane. The sounds they conjured were playful, exotic and raw, with exhilarating immediacy, and rhythmic exactitude and fire. It is hard to imagine a better partnership.
•At Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, on 6 July.
