Steven Osborne and Friends

Stockbridge Parish Church - 16/03/24

Steven Osborne, piano | Clea Friend, cello | Jean Johnson, clarinet | Greg Lawson, violin

Acclaimed Scottish concert pianist Steven Osborne is frequently to be seen performing and touring a wide-ranging solo and concerto repertoire in notable concert venues across the world. This was an opportunity to see him in a more intimate setting, performing French chamber music, which he loves, with other top rank musicians who also happen to be close to him personally – including, of course, his wife, talented clarinettist Jean Johnson.

The other contributors to this opening concert in the Stockbridge Music Hub series, which concluded on 23rdMarch with a Saint-Saëns (‘Carnival of the Animals’) family concert with narrator Alexander McCall Smith, were cellist Clea Friend and violinist Greg Lawson.

Both Debussy and Ravel, whose music featured throughout the evening, disliked the ‘impressionist’ label that they attracted. As Steven Osborne pointed out as he introduced and commented on the works chosen for performance, there were elements of that style in some, but by no means all, of their work. Instead, they essentially saw themselves as celebrating and innovating melody.

Debussy’s Cello Sonata, part of his project to write six sonatas for various instruments, and first performed in 1915, exemplifies his later style and is one of his most-performed works. Osborne and Friend brought out both the melodic and impressionistic elements of this inviting piece, including some subtle pizzicato on cello and the shared dance motif which leavens the whole. A delicate and delightful opener.

Next came the middle four movements of the six-part Children’s Corner Suite for solo piano by the same composer, including two Arabesque portions which Osborne wryly noted might be thought of as Debussy’s hits. It was a wonderful performance, lending freshness to a work he knows well. Its enduring appeal owes much to moments of eery beauty, such as those in the triple-time and soft-pedalled ‘Serenade for the Doll’, which portrays a porcelain doll and features the Chinese pentatonic scale throughout. Much of this material requires a subtle, liquid tone, by turns crystalline and shimmering. But sometimes Debussy is almost interrupting himself in excitement, too. 

The original clarinet and piano version of  Rhapsody No. 1 (1910) has been given famous attention by Glenn Gould and James. Debussy published his own orchestration of the accompaniment in 1911, after the official premiere. Jean Johnson offered us a spirited performance on clarinet, with Osborne interweaving piano lines with fluency, making what could have felt a crowded aural space seem expansive.

Ravel’s evocative ‘A Boat on the Ocean’ and ‘Valley of the Bells’ (movements three and five, respectively, of the solo piano suite, Miroirs) gave Steven Osborne the chance to explore shifting moods and colours through something akin to sound-painting, as he commented himself in introducing the pieces, written between 1904 and 1905. The two chosen movements were subsequently orchestrated, one by Ravel himself and the other by Percy Grainger. In their original form they are as rich and varied as the piano itself, and part of a conscious tribute to the group of innovative young artists, musicians, poets and critics to whom the composer was allied – who provocatively called themselves ‘the hooligans’. Very refined ones, that said!  

Lastly, violinist Greg Lawson brought further smiles to this thoughtful but good-natured chamber concert in introducing Debussy’s Sonata in G minor for Violin and Piano, which like the Cello Sonata that opened the concert arose from the context of war, but consciously reached towards beauty and hope. Here the lyricism of the violin begins to unfold from slow melancholy chord clusters in the first movement, before a dance-like interlude and a finale which heads in various directions before reaching its energetic conclusion.

Steve Osborne is clearly as at home in this kind of small-scale, collaborative setting as he is in the grander solo or large-scale concert mode. Indeed it enables him to relax a little more alongside his natural expressiveness and intensity. The audience was certainly appreciative of the warm, adventurous blend provided by four different but complementary musicians. 

Cover photo: Benjamin Ealovega