Melvyn Tan, St Leonards Church, Shoreditch, London, review: Tan played with consummate ease and grace
A specially curated programme to mark Melvyn Tan's 60th birthday and the 40th anniversary of Spitalfields Music, included the London premiere of 'Catching Fire' by Jonathan Dove
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Your support makes all the difference.Melvyn Tan made his name as a period-performance fortepianist. He’s since reverted to the piano and its mainstream Romantic repertoire: to celebrate both his 60th birthday and the 40th anniversary of the founding of Spitalfields Music, he chose to give a recital tailormade to honour that institution’s former executive director Judith Serota, in the 18th-century church where many of its concerts are held.
“Variations for Judith: Reflections on Bist du bei mir” is a collection of very short pieces on an aria which Bach originally adapted for his wife Anna Magdalena. The composers are one-time artistic directors of the Spitalfields Festival, along with Richard Rodney Bennett, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Thea Musgrave. What was striking in many of them was the near-homogeneity of style – they could have been one extended piece. A few stood out: Maxwell Davies’s bore the imprint of his unmistakable voice; Thea Musgrave’s was deceptively ingenious in its simultaneous departure from and adherence to the theme, while Richard Rodney Bennett’s had an unexpectedly Chopinesque expressiveness.
Then came three tours de force: Judith Weir’s I’ve turned the page, dazzling in its liberated invention; Jonathan Dove’s tumultuously exhilarating Catching Fire, getting its London premiere; and Liszt’s Three Concert Etudes, delivered by Tan with consummate ease and grace.
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