If you were asked to name an instrument which could symbolise popular music in all its forms, you’d point to the guitar, which is unchanging in both its shape and its sound.
For classical music the answer would have to be the piano, whose form also has never changed. But what’s remarkable is the constancy of the music which is played on it. Year after year, the same pieces are played, and in particular Beethoven’s last three sonatas, which were composed exactly 200 years ago. Beethoven was ill when he composed them, but each culminates in a triumphal mood, and each represents in a different way a summation of his divine craft.
Last night at the Wigmore they were played by one of the greatest pianists in the world, Mitsuko Uchida. The stalls were full of notabilities, including other leading pianists and even – humbly sitting in my row – the Duke of Kent. Such was the demand for tickets that tomorrow Uchida is playing the same sonatas again. What is it about this music, and this particular performer?
It was the longest post-performance silence I’ve known (Photo: Darius Weinberg via Kenny Morrison)Born in Japan, brought up in the Japanese embassy in Vienna, and settling in London, Dame Mitsuko has long been high on the list of Britain’s cultural treasures. She has a touch of extreme delicacy; her inner wildness is held in check by fastidious intellectual control. Her repertoire has always been dominated by Bach and Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven, and she regards her performances of these composers’ music as her sacred mission.
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She played the first sonata with spinning grace, as though surveying the emotional landscape she planned to explore. The second took her deep into that landscape, encountering everything from off-the-wall comedy to seemingly inconsolable grief, before emerging into the sunlight with a fugue first played upside down, and then right side up.
In the course of 90 minutes Uchida ran the whole gamut of moods and effects, sometimes swooningly lyrical, and at other times planning her assault on the keyboard like a panther stalking its prey.
The third sonata was breathtaking, opening with majestically rolling thunder, followed by an ecstatic meditation which eventually led us into heaven on the wings of an airy framework of trills.
It’s generally agreed that these three works constitute the most profound keyboard music ever written, and this great pianist’s take on them was unforgettable. When her last notes had died away, she went on sitting motionless for the longest post-performance silence I’ve ever known, and when people in the audience finally dared to break that silence, this evergreen and much-loved 76-year-old acknowledged her ovation with a girlish smile and an athletically low Japanese bow, then skipped off into the shadows.
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