Francis Menotti at Home for Leah Nicholson

2 Regent Terrace, Edinburgh - 04/08/23

Chez Menotti: Leah Nicholson Piano Recital 

The elegant drawing room of the Regent Terrace, Edinburgh Georgian townhouse of Francis “Chip” Menotti, adopted son of the late Italian-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti, welcomed a small, invited audience to a lunchtime recital by award-winning Anglo-Russian pianist Leah Nicholson on Friday 4th August, in an all-Russian programme played from memory. 

The recital opened with a Tchaikovsky miniature, No.8 of the 18 Pieces, Op.72, ‘Dialogue’.  A throbbing left-hand pulse underpinned the two voices articulated by the right hand.  Subtleties of phrasing and articulation endowed the two voices with individual character, which they retained even when they joined in an operatic lovers’ duet-like affirmation of mutual devotion.  As a string player, I marvel at how mechanical hammers hitting strings, in the hands of an expert, can draw the listener into the fantasy world of a piano piece; how the subtlest rubato and tenuto can have a listener at the edge of their seat.  So it was that Leah set out her stall.  Flawless phrasing was to be the hallmark of the performance and the crux of the magic.  There was more, much more to be revealed. 

Shostakovich’s Second Sonata in B minor Op.61 can be seen as an enigmatic work.  Unlike Bach, whom Shostakovich revered and for whom the key signified profound otherworldliness, spirituality and awe, Shostakovich hardly ever used the key, the only other well-known instance being the epic first movement of the lopsided Sixth Symphony, Op.54, originally intended as a Lenin biographical homage, a plan ultimately scrapped in the two irreverent other movements.  Superficial similarities in the piano writing between the Sonata and the ultimately optimistic and life-affirming Piano Quintet Op.57 (such as the glittering right-hand writing in the Sonata’s first movement and the to-and-fro migration of the melodic line between the hands) might tempt a performer to attempt to infuse the sonata with some of the spirit of the quintet.  I heard the great Elisabeth Leonskaja perform it a decade or so ago and her otherwise excellent performance seemed to me to have fallen into this trap.  The slow movement of the Sonata is a slow, limping Largo waltz.  Shostakovich’s waltzes, like the scherzo of the Fifth Symphony or the third movement of the Eighth Quartet, are almost always ironic.  What is going on here?  I believe that such purely musicological clues are misleading.  As often with Shostakovich, biographical detail is more enlightening (though I believe that the crucial clues are also detectable in the music).  The Sonata was composed in 1943, immediately after the Seventh Symphony Op.60, while the composer and his family were still evacuated from St Petersburg (Leningrad) to Samara (Kuybyshev), during the siege of Leningrad by the forces of the Third Reich.  The Symphony, named for the city, and its role in raising morale during the horrendous conditions of the siege, have become the stuff of legend.  The siege was still going on and the horrific death toll was mounting.  Shostakovich had heard three months previously of the premature death of his former piano professor, Leonid Nikolayev, from typhoid in Tashkent.  The Sonata is dedicated to his memory.  But there is no outpouring of grief.  Instead, the Largo projects a numbness, an inability to face, let alone process, the pain of grief.  I have inflicted my convoluted reasoning on the reader because I want to highlight how remarkable I find it that Leah, at the tender age of 21, has arrived at the same interpretative insight, possesses the consummate skill to perform it, and displays astonishing artistic and intellectual maturity in its realisation. The Largo was the best I’ve heard. The bustling “keep on keeping on” Allegretto first movement and the slightly obsessive (but very satisfying – only me?) Theme-and-Variations finale received the same treatment.  Notwithstanding the gleam of hope in the second-to-last variation and the seemingly calm resignation of the concluding minor cadence, this sonata represents emotional self-care postponed.  On Friday, Shostakovich spoke directly through Leah Nicholson. I feel very privileged to have been there to hear him. 

On the face of it, Rachmaninov’s Second Sonata Op.36 in B-flat minor is relatively uncomplicated, full of characteristic stormy passion and high romanticism (‘fiendishly difficult’ goes without saying). We heard the 1931 revised version (the composer himself having wisely trimmed the 1913 original). The stormy Allegro agitato opening and impassioned first subject were as thrilling as you like, but for me the second subject, rhapsodic idyllic reverie in D-flat major, is the absolute gem of the piece and it was played with surpassing beauty.  Rachmaninov evidently agrees, because we get to hear it again (in B-flat major) in the recapitulation (ah, the beauty of sonata form!) and E major in the middle of the slow movement.  Indeed, the work is a masterpiece of thematic unity, with musical ideas recurring across the three movements connected with bridging passages and played without a break.  I was struck by the raw power of the playing and how it was achieved without any theatrical physicality.  The music spoke – it needed no choreography.  The slow movement, a Romance not unlike that of the Second Symphony Op.27, featured exquisite phrasing and an impassioned climax, a tolling quickening bell in the left hand (Rachmaninov was obsessed with bells – and the Dies Irae of course, which does not appear in the sonata, as far as I can tell) and some astonishing virtuosic pianism in the rapid right-hand ornamentation.  The sonata-form Allegro molto is a fairly typical Rachmaninov finale, with an explosive start and a ‘big tune’ second theme, which returns climactically and passionately at the end, before an emphatic coda keeps us guessing but finishes with a major chord.  If the mission of the soloist is to persuade an audience that the music is as wonderful as they know it is (I say ‘if’; of course, it is), then Leah can rest assured: mission accomplished.  The curious reader may be delighted to learn that Leah’s performance of this sonata from the Second Round of the Aarhus International Piano Competition is available on YouTube. 

There were two encores. The first was Leah’s own piano arrangement of the melody of the song ‘Go Youth Belov’d’’ by Felix Yaniewicz, the co-founder of the (first) Edinburgh Festival in 1815 and Leah’s five times great grandfather. The reader may recall my review of a concert in December last year by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra under Peter Whelan, where, in a programme recreating those of the first Edinburgh Festival, the song of love and loss was sung very beautifully with Handelian melodic grace by Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught.  In Chip’s elegant Georgian Edinburgh home, the melody seemed to reconnect with its roots.  The second encore closed the programme as it had begun, with another number from Tchaikovsky’s Op.72, No.5 ‘Meditation’, initially indeed meditative but it is never long before Tchaikovsky wears his heart on his sleeve.  Very lovely. 

In conclusion, Leah Nicholson has a rare and special talent, bringing together technical mastery with an astonishingly mature interpretative facility, in particular with Russian repertoire with which she clearly has a special affinity, no doubt attributable at least in part to her maternal heritage.  Her studies continue with a scholarship to do a Masters’ degree at Royal Academy of Music in London, but she is already making a splash as a performer and can only go from strength to strength.  Watch out, world: Leah’s coming.