EIF: Steven Osborne

Old College Quad

Edinburgh’s world class pianist sells out two concerts.

Steven Osborne was born in Edinburgh and educated at the city’s St Mary’s School, which has a great tradition of producing young musicians. He has since gone on to be an international star of the concert circuit but has remained based in Edinburgh and is an annual feature of the Edinburgh Festival as well as giving Edinburgh concerts at other times in the year. He is also much loved in Edinburgh as shown by the fact that his two concerts in Edinburgh on Thursday 12th, only two hours apart, were both sold out, something few other artists have achieved particularly at £32 for a one-hour concert. 

So there was a great expectation in the full but socially distanced Old Quad on Thursday at 12pm. The weather was also cooperating with a weak sunny day and little wind. There was only occasional traffic noise to disturb our big tent Old Quad concert experience. Steven Osborne, dressed in concert black, got a warm welcome when he came on stage but I’m glad I had my binoculars with me to study his hands at work in performing his programme on the dimly lit stage. Steven began by welcoming us to the concert. Like all musicians at the Festival he was delighted to be playing again to a live audience, and prepared us for what was to come, including instructing us when to applaud and prepare for off keyboard bangs on the piano in a Tippet work. He began by playing a Schubert Impromptu No 1, a short work supposedly written spontaneously but showing signs of very careful composition. The first impression I got was how loud the piano was even in relatively quiet passages. The explanation was of course amplification, boosting the natural sound of the piano to a group of speakers overhead, reinforced in the opening passage by an unscripted bang at the back of the hall! Amplification is clearly needed in a really big (over 100m long) tent with a high roof, but it does produce a different sound to a pianist in the Queens Hall. That was brought home to me when I came home after the concert to the lunch-time concert on Radio 3, broadcasting yesterday’s live concert with Norwegian soprano Mari Eriksmoen, which I had just reviewed. In my review of the concert I noticed how loud she was due to amplification; on the radio she sounded much more subdued (although still somewhat operatic). Now of course there is always a difference between broadcast sound and live sound in a hall but it’s now clear to me that this is a much bigger difference in the amplified outdoor Festival experience. The sophisticated BBC microphones pick up and mix the sound without amplification and give a more natural sound, something we should be aware of. 

Having said that of course Steven Osborne was as usual a master of the keyboard, beginning with the delicacy and melody of the Schubert, then the modern complexity of American composer George Crumb’s work’ Processional’. He then moved on to the very loud and restless Second Piano Sonata of Michael Tippett, which included bangs on the piano from Osborne and occasional bangs from elsewhere in the Old Quad!  All this was the preparation for the majestic final Piano Sonata No 32 in C minor by Beethoven which he composed towards the end of his life when he was deaf. In this work Beethoven demonstrated his total mastery of the piano and in contrast to earlier works in this programme, Osborne played it without a music score. His total immersion in the music, suggests that he has been playing it all his life. It was a majestic performance and got a very warm response from the full audience, there was no encore; as one of my fellow critics said, “you can’t encore that!”