London Sinfonietta stays optimistic while Mitsuko Uchida bedazzles with Beethoven

Classical music in the UK has been singled out for some painful blows since the autumn, firstly from Arts Council England and then the BBC, so it is a relief when glimmers of optimism start to shine through the dark skies.

One of the hardest hit in Arts Council England’s cuts last November was the London Sinfonietta, down 41 per cent on its previous annual grant. One might assume that the ensemble would be considering drastic downsizing at least, but the mood music currently sounds somewhat more upbeat, with a determination to make the best of the future.

This most recent concert at the Royal Festival Hall filled a high proportion of the seats — no small feat for a programme of contemporary music in a 2,500-capacity venue. The main draw was Steve Reich’s Reich/Richter, a multidisciplinary work written for the opening of The Shed in New York in 2019 and performed here with its accompanying film.

Music and visuals go hand in hand. As Gerhard Richter’s abstract images narrow and divide, so Reich’s music divides its rhythms, mirroring the faster pulse. Similarly, the film blazes with colour, which is reflected in music richer in texture than many of Reich’s earlier works. If the trajectory of both sometimes seems glacially slow, that has been a defining factor of minimalism from the start.

The first half was framed by two performances of Julius Eastman’s happily burbling Joy Boy. Anna Clyne’s Fractured Time, receiving its premiere, packed “states of fever, lucidity and anxiety” into a vividly busy six minutes. Mira Calix’s Nunu (2003), a tribute following the composer’s untimely death last year, imaginatively blends strings, electronics and live insects into a sound-and-vision montage, not unlike Reich/Richter. Julia Wolfe’s Tell me everything (1994) broke up the sequence with aggressive hammering. Variously sized groups of players from the London Sinfonietta, conducted by Manoj Kamps, displayed their expertise.

★★★☆☆

The day before, an even larger audience was on hand to hear Mitsuko Uchida playing Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas. After several years of half-empty halls as a result of the pandemic, it is heartening to see a capacity crowd.

In 2006, Uchida’s recording of these sonatas was hailed for its precision and detail. There must be a risk that music so thoroughly prepared then might lose its spontaneity over time, but there was nothing about these performances that felt tired, studied or predictable.

In these last three of his 32 sonatas, Beethoven was pushing at the limits of the possible, not so much in terms of technique, but in his fusion of styles, reaching out in opposing directions to fugues and romanticism, and the extremes of sound that the deaf composer could hammer from his piano.

There is a powerful sense of struggle to much of the music and Uchida did not stint on that, but her most special moments came in those shafts of visionary inspiration when Beethoven seems to open a window beyond his own time and place. The ending of the final sonata, Op. 111, enters another world and Uchida held her large audience there spellbound.

★★★★☆

southbankcentre.co.uk