Page 189 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

Opening up in Scotland was much more cautious, but the artists at the superlative East Neuk
Festival, all performing this year in the big, acoustically tricky space of the Bowhouse, which
allows distancing of the audience, could not have been stronger. It all began with a bang as
Samson Tsoy plunged into the dissonant parody of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto to launch
a sequence of Kurtág’s Játékok (Games). The revelation for me was Fanny Mendelssohn’s E flat
String Quartet, which the wonderful Castalian Quartet placed after Felix’s grief-stricken Sixth; it’s
th
tough, but brilliant. The Mendelssohn sister has to be the best of all 19 century women
composers; how shameful that her talent couldn’t thrive even more.

At the Two Moors Festival’s first (Dartmoor) weekend, I heard for the first time the pianist George
Xiaoyuan Fu (pictured below by Clive Barda) in a beautifully sequenced programme of bird
music – for me young artist of the year, though the now well-estabilished Tsoy and Kolesnikov
brought our their third cornucopia of great chamber-musical performances at the Ragged
School in London’s East End as soon as such things were possible. Another quirky venue
favoured by the two pianists and partners, the Peckham Multi-Storey Car Park performance
space managed by Bold Tendencies, took on its biggest venture yet - the two Brahms piano
concertos magisterially handled by Tsoy with Maxim Emelyanychev conducting a full (and first
rate) Philharmonia Orchestra. Bold Tendencies' commitment to vital community epics yielded a
magnificent performance of Kate Whitley's eco-cantata Our Future in Your Hands including a
lusty chorus of 97 Peckham schoolchildren - another spectacular one didn't expect to witness in
2021.

As usual, it’s hard to choose from the wealth of great performances the Wigmore Hall has
continued to support, but I was mesmerised as always by guitarist Sean Shibe in an enchanted
May lunchtime hour and knocked sideways by the supremely cultured quick-change artistry of
Czechia’s Smetana Piano Trio. We know from experience that this hall can exercise the finest