Baroque lute recital by John Reeve, ' The Elegy of the French Lute: The music of Robert de Visée' , 29 April 2021

There was an almost surreal quality to this recital on the baroque lute by John Reeve, himself a founder member of the European Lute Orchestra. The combination of the rich sonority of the beautiful instrument transported us immediately back to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, yet there was also a reminder of our presence in the twenty-first: the music of Robert de Visée was itself being broadcast online, probably a world première in that regard.

Introducing the programme, Reeve wrote: "The lute music of France dominated the seventeenth century, and that of Robert de Visée is the last French lute music by a great master. We know very little about the life of Robert de Visée, not even the dates of his birth and death. He was probably born around 1650 and died some time after 1736. He first became famous as a guitarist and published two books of guitar music in the 1680s, dedicated to Louis XIV. He was a prominent musician at Court, where he is recorded as habitually entertaining the King with his guitar late in the evening, as well as playing the theorbo in concert with musicians such as François Couperin and Marin Marais. He was guitar tutor to the Dauphin and continued this after the latter’s accession as Louis XV in 1715."

The programme encompassed four suites, or pièces, each enchanting in its own right and surprisingly varied in their treatment of many dance forms. One of the most delicate was the Rondeau La Musette from the set in A major, yet the variety of pace and emotion within each of the dances provided the virtual audience with constant engagement. As for playing an instrument with twenty strings, Reeve’s mastery was evident in both the technical demands of the faster movements and the astonishingly sustained phrasing of the Sarabandes in particular.

Whilst two of the suites had no more than three movements, one in F# minor had no less than seven, including two contrasting Allemandes, marked either Gaye or Grave. The extended passage work was accomplished with apparent effortlessness, enabling the composer’s imaginative treatment of that particular dance form to be convincingly displayed. This was even more so in the contrasting Gigues: in the Suites these were marked Gaye, reflecting our more common modern understanding of that dance, at least since the time of J S Bach. In the two Pièces, however, the Gigues were marked Grave, perhaps counter-intuitively for us, yet Reeve made the slower tempo dance too, combining a vibrant sense of rhythm with an almost sedentary interpretation. It was a delight, and utterly convincing.

The lute of the composer’s time had developed over several decades. The twenty strings were divided into eleven ‘courses’ of two strings (the highest two were, however, single strings). The baroque lute had greater resonance than its predecessor in the Renaissance, and was thus more suitable for the combination of melody with accompaniment of the later period. The pitch of Reeve’s 1984 lute was a tone lower than modern pitch, consistent with French baroque practice.

Giving a live recital online presents a particular challenge for any performer, especially on an instrument designed for the intimacy of a drawing room or salon. John Reeve handled this with considerable facility, enabling all those in the audience to feel that they were there in the front row of Louis XIV’s own private apartments.

John Dunston, Director of Music, Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, UK

Piano recital by Ana Bursac, 11 February 2021

Schumann: Piano Sonata No. 1 Op. 11

Online from the synagogue of Novi Sad, Serbia

Robert Schumann’s Piano Sonata No. 1 Op. 11, written between 1833 and 1835, embraces a world of emotion. An iconic example of German Romanticism, this work is on a monumental scale comparable, though for different forces, to that other towering composition also numbered One, the First Symphony of Johannes Brahms. And it presents immense and formidable challenges to the pianist both emotionally and technically.

The traditional form of the sonata is here expanded by Schumann in order to express a particularly personal message, and although we should not be constrained by any search for a ‘programme’, the urgency and heartfelt pleading that alternate with dramatic, feverish restlessness convey vividly the passion felt by the young composer in his early twenties for his beloved Clara Wieck, notwithstanding her father’s determined and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to keep them apart.

It therefore takes a musician of exceptional depth and maturity to bring off a live performance, even more so when the Covid-19 pandemic requires it to take place remotely. The Serbian pianist Ana Bursac is clearly such a pianist. Her compelling performance yesterday in Serbia was given as part of the Recital Series at Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford, to an online audience in several countries. Undeterred, she brought immediate, dramatic intensity to the opening adagio, with its suggestion of poignant despair, followed by the sudden urgency with which she plunged into the ensuing Allegro vivace. Bursac brought a relentlessly rhythmic drive to the anguished, repeated short-short-long motif, at the same time sensitively conducting the pleading dialogue between right and left hands. Here was a pianist absolutely at home in Schumann’s emotional world, an impression confirmed as the final, slower melody sang out over the chromaticism below.

The audience was therefore well prepared for the captivating, lush tone and velvet phrasing that characterised Bersac’s playing of the second movement. The oxymoronic description ‘Senza passione, ma espressivo’ must present a challenge to every interpreter, yet here was the perfect response. It was almost as if Schumann, across the ages, had had such a pianist in mind, since the movement, based on an earlier song of his, was presciently dedicated “To Anna”.

The Scherzo that followed simply exploded into life, the cross-rhythms and harmonic progressions brought out with intuitive flair and yet gracious poise. Schumann poses yet another teaser in his description of the Intermezzo into which it merges: Lento. Alla burla ma non pomposo. There seemed to be just the right impishness contrasting with the fragmentary slower sections to avoid any notion of pomposity.

And so to the finale, with its fugato theme of weighty power dissolving into graceful lyricism, almost like a chorale, a prayer imbued by Bursac with an undercurrent of nervous anxiety. This was playing that exploited the full dynamic range of the piano in the final moments, as she controlled so well the approach to the climax. Even now, there were surprises in store, as delicate dancing and cheeky melodic syncopation whisked us through romantic sequences with feverish intensity to the sonata’s majestic conclusion.

This splendid online recital came from the great synagogue in Novi Sad, Serbia’s second largest city and the European Capital of Culture for 2021. The setting could not have been more appropriate for a performance of one of the German composer’s major works for piano, by a young Serbian artist who surely has a glittering future ahead, hosted by the Music Society of an Oxford University College in the UK. The name of Ana Bursac will be one to watch out for.

John Dunston, Director of Music, Harris Manchester College