OAE/Schiff review – nothing less than a revelation

Royal Festival Hall, London
Brahms’s First Piano Concerto was reborn thanks to the OAE’s incisive playing and András Schiff’s characterful phrasing

Before the performance of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto that made up the second half of this concert with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, András Schiff made a short speech to the Festival Hall audience. This was, he said, “music that you think you know, but we don’t know it well enough”. Those words could serve as the motto for the onward march of the historically informed performance movement, of which the OAE and Schiff are leading but mercifully undoctrinaire advocates. They were absorbingly vindicated in the performance that followed, which in many respects was nothing less than a revelation.

At its heart was the Blüthner grand piano, built in Leipzig at around the time of the work’s unhappy 1859 premiere, and imported for the occasion, apparently from Amsterdam, on which Schiff played Brahms’s dark and leonine concerto. Straight rather than cross strung, the Blüthner instrument lacks the resonant power, especially in the bass, of more modern pianos. Yet it produces a muscular and ringing sound of its own, and with Schiff also directing an orchestra of less than 60, the concerto emerged as a piece reborn.

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