Uchida at Fairlight
VICTORIA KINGHAM
Once in a century there comes along a composer of towering genius. Once in a century too, there comes along a virtuoso exponent of that composer. It was the ultimate privilege to hear Mitsuko Uchida, a slight figure in black, use the Steinway Grand at Fairlight Hall to make us know in fact, not just in theory, that Beethoven was the greatest composer who has ever lived and who still somehow lives in almost all the music we have ever heard. It would be interesting to know at what stage she realised that she was born to become a precious and irreplaceable conduit for the world’s finest musical compositions.
It isn’t just about how brilliantly she plays, how she has internalised everything, how deftly and carefully she travels through a staccato passage towards a climbing melodic resolution, how she enhances, expounds, and exploits the tonal variety and the volume, how she lands, wonderfully, on a characteristic Beethoven discord twice, pauses, lifts, and then leans into a lyrical recapitulation which wrenches your heart. It isn’t even that she can make you aware of every note, every cadence, every beautiful transfer of the melodic line from the treble clef to bass, from the call to the response, or that she plays the syncopated passage from the Sonata 111 Adagio with the greatest perfection and joy, reminding us of all the jazz and blues we have listened to. It’s that she is able to translate all of her own vast understanding of the completeness of Beethoven’s musical structures, the astonishing rhythmic variety laid over a basic metre, his incredible thematic variations, his endless and unprecedented harmonic inventions, modulations, and explorations, and so subsume herself that she allows her audience to hear Beethoven as they never heard him before.
These three sonatas are universally held to be some of the most outstanding works ever written for the keyboard. Uchida has said of Beethoven that one of his most moving and amazing characteristics is that somehow, well before Einstein, or black holes or modern astronomical science, his music actually showed that he knew how endless the universe was. From a hopeless abyss, through his music, she has said, he is able to look up and see the light. Listen if you can to her masterclasses – one or two have been uploaded to YouTube – and marvel, because she is not only a truly gifted pianist but a quite exceptional musicologist and teacher. And all the while she is most unassuming and engaging, and can address any kind of audience, educated or ignorant, large or small, with the same selfless regard for the music which, through her own enormous fund of knowledge, she is able to bring to life, and by doing this, change the lives of her listeners.
Uchida gave this performance at Fairlight Hall, Hastings, as part of a 25-date tour which will take her next to the Royal Festival Hall London and from there to most of the great concert halls throughout Europe and America. This intimate recital was a fundraising event in support of Hastings International Piano, a charity relying solely on public donations, that stages (besides the well-regarded annual Concerto competition) various high-quality concerts, schools music programmes and events, and master classes.
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