For András Schiff, 2013 was dominated by two composers, and in his final Wigmore Hall appearance of the year, on his 60th birthday, he brought them together in a single, monumentally memorable programme. In the early part of the year, Schiff had completed his cycle of the Beethoven sonatas, while over the last couple of months he has worked his way through Bach's keyboard works. This recital concluded both cycles, with Bach's Goldberg Variations forming the first half, followed by Beethoven's Diabelli Variations.
It was an extraordinary feat of musicianship and concentration, which drew many parallels between the two monumental works – for Beethoven, the Goldberg was a conscious model. But the performances were very different in tone. Schiff's approach to the Bach seemed strict, almost didactic, with surprisingly little interest in the music's beauty; his presentation of the opening theme was brisk to the point of seeming perfunctory, and later variations that could have been virtuosically dazzling or searchingly expressive never quite reached those levels.
The Beethoven, though, was everything the Goldberg was not. From the start, Schiff's performance seemed relaxed, extrovert and intensely communicative. The moments of humour were vividly conveyed, even incorporating an exchange with a persistent cougher in the audience, while the cumulative emotional weight of variations 29 to 31, and the cathartic exuberance of the triple fugue that followed were unmistakable.
Afterwards, Schiff was presented with the gold medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society by the Duke of Kent. He followed his charmingly modest acceptance speech with the briefest of encores – In Memory of a Pure Soul: Klara Schiff in Memoriam, the piece for right hand alone that his teacher György Kurtág composed as a tribute to his mother. It made a perfectly judged close to a year of memorable Wigmore appearances.
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