IT is every promoter’s nightmare when a star performer cancels at the eleventh hour with illness. Anna Tsybuleva was marooned in Moscow with a malady, but Charles Owen rode to the rescue of the British Music Society with an evening of Bach, Brahms, Ravel and Liszt’s take on Isolde’s Love-death.
Owen made a strong impression with a late-night recital in the last Ryedale Festival. He did not disappoint here, opening with a jaunty account of Bach’s Italian Concerto, which was distinguished by admirable clarity leavened with dry wit.
In complete contrast were Brahms’s two big-boned, minor-key Rhapsodies, Op 79, which were fierily expansive. But, again, Owen kept the textures clean, resisting the temptation to over-pedal. The composer’s tenderer side emerged in the four caprices and four intermezzos of Op 76. The caprices might have been more openly impulsive, although the B minor was wryly puckish and the C major made a majestic finale.
Romantic nostalgia marked the Intermezzo in B flat, while the pair in A, one major, one minor, were finely balanced, the first with a delicate ebb and flow, the other deeply elegiac. Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit (three poems after Aloysius Bertrand) demands a wide palette and a faultless technique. Owen displayed both: from the rippling moonlight of Ondine to the crisp syncopation of the notoriously taxing Scarbo, he was riveting. Liszt’s reworking of Wagner was serenity itself by comparison.
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