Piano Wiltshire Music Centre, Bradford on Avon NEVER judge a book by its cover – and never, it seems, judge a concert by the programme notes.
Style, so we were told, developed out of minimalism, and a “piece about time… its various manifestations and ultimate inevitability…” filled me with more than foreboding as Miss Stott set about Relent, by Graham Fitkin (Do I hear you ask ‘Who?’). But it was great: busy, highly rhythmical, even musical, well, in parts. You remember the tempo, the funky rhythms, but I didn’t actually leave humming the hit tune from it. It could have been so much worse.
No doubt it was the sort of piece that made a lot of people give the concert a miss. Their loss. It was a “dreamy” sort of evening – there were, after all three nocturnes (two by Faure and one Debussy) – wonderfully rescued by the Fitkin and Cesar Franck’s rarely played Prelude, Choral et Fugue.
There are in the Franck undertones of a sort of X-Factor type of A-list – Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt and Wager – and Miss Stott’s energetic interpretation had room for all those.
Her preciseness came tellingly through on the sparkling, almost brittle, tone of Roger Field’s Steinway Model D concert grand; the majesty of her playing so good to hear.
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