No phones were held aloft while Igor Levit - the Russian-born, German-based pianist - and two other top soloists, French violinist Renaud Capuçon and Austrian cellist Julia Hagen, played the complete Brahms piano trios last weekend. Despite Wigmore Hall’s strictures on the use of any electronic devices, every seat was sold. The capacity audience, of all ages, sat stock still, concentrating hard, throughout. At the end they whooped and cheered and some took pictures. These three trios, written across Brahms’s lifetime, have no programme, in the sense of stories attached. The listener’s ears and mind weave their own narrative.
Until a fortnight ago, any observation about the disruptive use of mobiles at concerts would have been dismissed as classical-elite fuss. After the announcement by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s chief executive that she was happy for phones to be used in concerts, a long thorny subject has become news. A week on, with complaints from all sides, some backtracking has taken place: dim the brightness, don’t use flash, performers’ views will be honoured, some concerts might be more appropriate than others.
More on this shortly. First, Brahms. Levit, who has a zest for entities – complete Beethoven sonatas, complete Bach partitas – played all four sets of late Brahms piano works, in London, in January. Two months later, at the Heidelberg spring music festival, where he is co-artistic director, he explored the chamber music with Capuçon and Hagen, among others. Immersion, Levit style, is always total. As a solo pianist, he is used to the limelight. Here he shared, yielded, collaborated, giving freedom to Hagen’s lyrical cello playing and violinist Capuçon’s elegance and intensity.
In Trio No 1 in B major Op 8 (written early and revised later), the piano strikes out alone. Once cello, and then violin, join in, all fly off in joyous exchange, together and apart. You see Brahms’s point, three speaking as one. This being Brahms, there is melancholy – try the slow movement of No 2 in C – and anxiety too: the spiky, nervy scherzo of No 3 in C minor. An occasional tiny finger slip, here and there, was a reminder of the demands this composer makes on players. The outpouring of notes might be vast, but not one is wasted. Levit has said playing Brahms makes him happy. We loudly agree.
The Manchester Camerata, performing in the city’s Albert Hall and calling the programme Disruptors, was another example of the power of listening, no phone required. Karen Ní Bhroin, a young Irish musician with a rising reputation, conducted. In the cavernous former chapel, all columns, stained glass and Victorian gothic, this imaginative ensemble switched deftly between world premiere, Beethoven and a HideOut Youth Zone Sunday Club collaboration with young people from Gorton in the south-east of the city. A former monastery in that area is now the Camerata’s home. The ensemble’s outreach work is extensive: last week, with £1m funding committed by the city’s mayor, Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester was announced as the UK’s first centre for music and dementia, hosted by the Camerata, working in partnership with the Alzheimer’s Society.
The new work, Actions Speak Louder, by Carmel Smickersgill, a Manchester-based composer still in her 20s, wittily engaged us (via spoken instructions over a pulsating score) and intelligently questioned where authority lies in music. Shout “ha” if you’d rather the musicians were left to get on with playing without all this audience involvement, asked the voiceover. Only a lone “ha” sounded. The enthusiastic participants from Youth Zone sang lustily in Wake Up, a piece they had created about the trials and opportunities of getting up in the morning.
As well as giving an explosive, quickfire account of Beethoven’s Symphony No 8, the Camerata showed their finesse in his Piano Concerto No 1 in C major with Ethan David Loch as soloist. Loch, 19, who is also a composer, won the keyboard final of BBC Young Musician in 2022. He has been blind since birth. His chief method of learning and memorising music is through hearing it repeated, rather than using braille. To establish the kinship needed between soloist, orchestra and conductor, Loch makes big gestures with his shoulders and hands. Otherwise, it might be in the lap of the gods – except it is not. As in all music, exceptionally so here, every player has to sense how Loch wants to shape a phrase, where to push forward or hold back. These players, directed by Ní Bhroin with incisive empathy, did so brilliantly.
Loch, perhaps alone among soloists, would have been indifferent to flashes of phone activity in the audience. (I saw none.) Implicitly, he put the case, as powerfully as anyone ever could, for switching off the rest of the world – including our phones – and relying on the incredible possibilities of the mind’s eye. The foot-stamping on the resonant wooden floors, as he took his bow, collapsible cane in hand, told the youthful soloist he had triumphed.
Star ratings (out of five):
Igor Levit, Renaud Capuçon, Julia Hagen ★★★★★
Disruptors ★★★★★
