Seen and Heard International, Mark Berry
“Tim Horton’s Wigmore Hall residency, in which he presents Chopin’s music alongside important predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, has reached Bach, offering the second English Suite and an illuminating Chopin selection. The C-sharp minor Prelude – Chopin’s, not Bach’s – opened and proceeded in a way that set the tone for the entire recital: both muscular and melting, clarity and direction likewise two sides to the same musical coin.”
The notes mattered, and one felt that; so too did Chopin’s harmonic surprises. Not for the last time here, without necessarily sounding Lisztian, the playing made one keen to hear Horton’s Liszt. At the opposite end of the first half, the A minor Waltz, Op.34 No.2, explored its tonality with a sadness emerging from its material, rather than applied to it, and thus all the stronger for it. Rubato here, as elsewhere, was unexaggerated yet telling…
In between came the English Suite, its A minor presaging the Waltz. This was not Chopinesque Bach as such; it had its own validity. It was, though, a validity that drew connections and created a properly satisfying musical programme, reminding us that Bach’s may be the greatest piano music of all…
Chopin’s F minor Fantasy, Op.49, opened the second half, inheriting and extending the recital’s preceding virtues, whilst delineating this piece’s decidedly particular character and form… This music can readily fall apart when presented according to pre-conceived structural ideas that are not Chopin’s; not so here, quite the contrary.
“The two Op.26 Polonaises were eloquently presented in relation to one another; harmonic foundations key to that conception. The anger and grief of the latter, in E-flat minor, spoke with a sensibility it was difficult not to think tragic, albeit finely differentiated… I found it deeply moving.”
So too were the three Op.63 Mazurkas, similarly conceived as a set, yet ever alert to individual qualities… The Polonaise-fantaisie is not my favourite Chopin, but this attentively painted performance had me listen and, I fancied, understand its structure as rarely before. Unfailingly eloquent, it unfolded both on its own terms and in light of what had gone before… Compositional origins sounded here with musical immanence. As an encore, we heard a characteristic Op.9 No.2 Nocturne, direct and sensitive in equal measure. Once again, I look forward to future instalments in this fascinating series.
