The idea of a piano recital is not always as tempting as chamber music played by several instruments, but this morning’s Coffee Concert given by Tom Poster was one not to miss. (If you did miss it, you can catch a recording of the same programme played by him – though not the Oxford performance – on Radio Three’s Lunchtime Concert this Wednesday.)
Poster is a versatile musician, engaging not only in piano playing but also composing, conducting, arranging and many other activities, including Swannee-whistling. His programme at the Coffee Concert was unashamedly Romantic, including works by Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, Maria Szymanowska (who introduced the Nocturne to Poland before Chopin), Robert and Clara Schumann and Franz Schubert. He declared himself relieved that the programme notes provided were respectful of the Mendelssohn Songs Without Words with which he began, having sometimes arrived at a concert hall to play them only to find the programme notes apologetic or even contemptuous. The three that he played made a delightful and lyrical introduction – and the last, which Mendelssohn wrote for Clara Schumann several years before she married Robert – should certainly have set her thinking about his feelings for her.
These were followed by three different but equally delicious Nocturnes – by Szymanoswska (who was born shortly before Mozart died), Fanny Mendelssohn and Clara Schumann. Poster invited us to think about what might have developed if the latter two women had had more scope and opportunity to develop their lives as composers. Fanny Mendelssohn was famously inhibited by her family’s sense of decorum: her younger brother Felix being encouraged to pursue a musical career, while she was instructed to think of music ‘as no more than an ornament’. It was probably with the best of intentions that Felix published three of her songs under his own name – intentions that backfired in an interview with Queen Victoria: when she pronounced that one of his songs was her favourite, he had to confess that actually that one was by his sister.
Clara Schumann was not so much held back from composing (except of course that Robert needed quiet in the house for his own), but with a number of children to support, and Robert’s needs to attend to, she spent much of her life on the road as a concert pianist; and after his death she devoted whatever time was left over from this to the editing and dissemination of his work. Nevertheless, she made a significant contribution as a composer, which is gradually becoming better known. The Notturno from her opus 6, Soirées Musicales was exquisitely crafted and a joy to listen to.
A further treat was the whole of Robert Schumann’s Waldscenen – his last important cycle of piano pieces – which Poster played with an eloquence and coherence that took us not only through the imagined woodland, but through a gradually deepening journey of discovery and letting go.
Poster finished with two of Schubert’s Impromptus – D899 nos 3 and 4 – both of them well-known and wonderfully romantic, both rippling and flowing around exquisite melodies. Poster gave to these – and to everything he played – not only great technical skill but also a heartfelt understanding that could not but convey itself to those listening.
The audience was clearly moved and there was much stamping of feet during the applause. A woman sitting in front of me twice turned round and tapped my knee to prevent me joining in the foot stamping – a Holywell tradition much beloved by audiences, and, I believe performers. I desisted, thinking perhaps she had a problem with her ears as a result of it, and as we left I opened my mouth to ask her why it troubled her. Before I could speak she told me ‘I strongly disapprove of foot-stamping.’ The mystery remains as to how anyone could have sat through that 75 minutes of music and disapprove of anything by the end of it – but then there are so many mysteries in life.
The audience was clearly much moved by what they heard – and rightly so. At the beginning, Poster had remarked what a strange instrument the piano is: percussive in design and yet we spend our lives trying to make it sing. That was certainly achieved in this recital, and the mixture of familiar and rarely heard voices was not only beautiful, but took us for a while to another level of being.
