Imogen Cooper review: Supremely gifted pianist delivers an exquisite birthday treat

Supremely gifted: Imogen Cooper
Sussie Ahlburg
Barry Millington23 October 2019

Some people celebrate their 70th birthday by skydiving, others with afternoon tea at the Ritz. The much-loved British pianist Imogen Cooper chose to play Schubert’s final three sonatas in an extended tripartite recital.

Cooper has recently established a musical retreat in a remote foreign location, where promising young talents work with her in meticulous detail away from the pressures of everyday life. And one of the things that is special about Cooper’s own playing is precisely that timeless, unhurried quality: in the Wigmore Hall we may be only a few hundred yards from the hurly-burly of Oxford Circus, but music-making of this calibre transports us to another plane of existence.

Her other outstanding quality is the perfectly calibrated phrasing, whether of a single cantabile line or the opening chorale-like theme of the B flat Sonata (D960). In that sonata too, the melancholic undertow of the first two movements was ever-present. There was similarly an elegiac tread to the slow movement of the A major (D959), the plangent sonorities of the open chords seeming to presage the extraordinary frenzied outburst in the middle.

By contrast, the playfulness of that sonata’s Scherzo brought a smile to the lips, while the finale of the C minor Sonata (D958) delightfully resembled a madcap gallop through the composer’s favourite Styrian mountains.

The opening two movements of the C minor demonstrated Cooper’s command of another aspect of the Schubert style: the dialectic interplay of declamatory material with passages of ravishing serenity. The former is ever-present, but the sideways shifts into emotionally freighted registers were gauged exquisitely.

Despite the standing ovation, there were no encores, no signings. Re-entering the orbit of Oxford Circus was a painful experience after the shared intimacies offered by this supremely gifted pianist.

Where to hear classical music in London - In pictures

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