The continued rise of Stockbridge Music, phoenix-like from the ashes of the pandemic, was fully on display in their spring concert featuring a piano-cello partnership of Adrian Brendel and Charles Owen.

These celebrated international artistes played to a capacity audience in Stockbridge church (with 190 tickets sold, their largest-ever house).

“These two”, said Tim Lowden, SM’s musical director and impresario, “are stratospheric”. Indeed, they were. Their wide-ranging shared tastes featured a programme spanning three centuries, from Bach’s cello suite in D minor, moving on to Faure’s majestic cello sonata in homage to Napoleon (whose middle movement, intriguingly, was composed before the first and third).

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We then heard two piano works by Liszt (best known perhaps for composing often fiendishly difficult music for the piano), then two Elegies for both instruments, both composed towards the end of Liszt’s life. One of the piano pieces however was composed at the age of 24 at a Swiss lakeside, with its simulation of the effects of water skilfully following up Schubert’s work as the first composer to explore music depicting water. Interspersed was the memorial cello solo by the Hungarian Gyorgy Kurtag, still active and teaching at 95.

The pan-European stamp of the programme’s repertoire was rounded off by Beethoven’s G minor cello sonata Opus 5 no 2, written in the last 10 years of his life which carried the full Beethoven range of musical emotion. There was the plangent opening movement: slow, questing, explorative, moving to ominous foreboding, all beautifully served by the minor key. It progressed to the majestic, magnificent, emotionally explosive later stages, the full fireworks at the hands of the Master. Wonderful music, learnt by Adrian Brendel at the age of 17, played with his school cello teacher contentedly and proudly in the audience. Stratospheric indeed.

Message from the editor Kimberley Barber

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