Lammermuir Festival: Music for Two Pianos
Dunbar Parish Church - 11/09/22
Dunbar Parish Church on the night of 11th September played host to the virtuoso piano duo, Clare Hammond and Richard Uttley. In his introductory remarks before the performance, Artistic Co-Director of the Lammermuir Festival James Waters drew attention to the magnificent sight of two Steinway D concert grand pianos on the altar space and expanded anecdotally on why a concert scheduled for last year had been postponed to this. The planned venue had been The Brunton in Musselburgh, where one Steinway D already resides, prompting the natural assumption that where one resided another could enter. This assumption took no cognisance of the fact that, in a recent refurbishment, the goods lift at The Brunton had been replaced with a smaller model – not only can a matching grand piano not enter the performance space, but the existing one is forever captive in situ. The deficit is a matter of centimetres, but that was enough to cause the performance to be rescheduled.
The programme was selected from the repertoire of celebrated husband-and-wife duo, Bartlett and Robertson, active artistically 1924 to 1956, and modelled on their programmes.
The concert opened with Bach’s ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’, in a reading that was measured, controlled and elegant. Mozart’s 3-movement D-major Sonata for Two Pianos, a work forever associated with the fabled “Mozart Effect”, where simply listening to it is supposed to enhance cognitive ability, was equally elegant, though I became increasingly aware of a different, less welcome, effect: that of a reverberant acoustic, tending to blur some of the chamber music interplay between the two state-of-the-art instruments. I found myself musing, not for the first time, how much better this music would sound in a purpose-built auditorium, rather than a tall bare-walled church. All for the sake of a few centimetres.
Debussy’s anti-war avant-garde 3-movement ‘En Blanc et Noir’ was paradoxically full of contrasting tonal colour and sonority and expressively played. Rachmaninov’s Op. 17 Suite No.2, marking a return to passionate creativity following recovery from a nervous breakdown precipitated by the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony, was warm and passionate, if somewhat blurred by the echo. Bax’s ‘The Poisoned Fountain’, a Celtic Twilight Bartlett & Robertson commission, was an atmospheric impressionistic sound picture, as was Granados’ ‘The Lover and the Nightingale’, with a contrasting Spanish flavour, continued into da Falla’s Spanish Dance No.1 from his opera ‘La Vida Breve’.
One encore was played: the waltz from Arensky’s ‘Suite for Two Pianos’ Op. 15. Fabulous playing brought the very enjoyable performance, only slightly marred by an over-live acoustic, to a close.