Mozart floated into the Royal Festival Hall on Wednesday night under the fingers of Mitsuko Uchida. His Rondo in A minor K 511 is an elegant little piece in its own right, but Uchida made its enigmatic sadness sing to a disquieting degree. Her touch was full of grace, and her expression deeply moving, both in the contrastive major-key episodes and in the ever more poignant returns of the lilting semiquaver theme. This was a stunning, even unsettling, opening.
The packed audience, already prepared for an intimate company with the soloist, was now locked into a close embrace with an account of sound that brought forth all its tragic implications of built-in decay. Uchida harvested this elusive relation of sound and audience in her performance of Webern's Variations Opus 27. The work is a tiny hall of mirrors full of serial palindromes and penumbras of fleeing gestures. It can, in more mechanical hands, appear inscrutable. Yet here it sung, complementing the sublime aspect of the Mozart with its own dancing lattice of sounds.
What was most striking about the performance was how musical the principles underlying the serial method were made to be. Workings of different row iterations built up in echo and across balletic dynamics in an utterly captivating zeal of sound. It is a shame Uchida hasn't yet turned her hand to contemporary repertoire, or even to mid-twentieth century music, which you feel she would interpret in an entirely unique and questioning way.
The sense of on-the-edge music making continued into the Beethoven A-Major Op. 101 Sonata. The enigmatic treatment of tonal strategy and the corresponding invigoration of form in this work were grist to Uchida's poetic mill. She brought the audience on an irresistible charge into the extremes of proto-romantic aesthetics. The condensed opening movement teetered on the point of disguised stability, before a barn-storming, martial Scherzo exploded out of the piano. For the first time in the evening, the full power of Uchida's projection, and her rhythmic vigour, shone through.
An ineffable slow movement recalled the enigma of the Mozart. This led to a shocking turn into the finale, a head-spinning transition which is achieved through the wedding of a fantastical cadenza to a return of the opening material of the whole work, before a quicksilver twist into the huge first subject. Uchida dazzled in the many peregrinations of the movement; the forthrightness of the fugal developmental passage and the brilliant recapitulation, with A-major now firmly ensconced, stood out.
Uchida brought a sense of poetic revelation to the closing Schumann, his Fantasy in C, just as she did to each of the preceding works. Though here once again one or two wrong notes, and even some problems with resolutions of notes not quite coming out accurately, were in evidence, Uchida's sense of the full emotions and the chaotic narrative of Schumann's expression was as glowing and palpable as in any of the interpretations I’ve heard in the past. Her rubato in the return of the second theme in the first movement brought out all its internal frailty, whilst her inwardly-turned third movement strained at the boundary of solidity. The drawing-out of the final chords added yet another layer of character to an already rich performance. The pianist concluded with a suitably enigmatic encore; the fourth of Schoenberg's exploratory and here quite beautiful Six Little Piano Pieces, Op. 19.
Photo: Mitsuko Uchida by Nir Elias
Related articles:
Concert Review: Uchida and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe at the RFH in 2008
CD Review: Uchida in Berg and Mozart under Boulez (Decca 4780316)
Concert Review: Uchida in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25 under Mackerras
Concert Review: Uchida and Tetzlaff in Berg, under Salonen