Ben Goldscheider & Richard Uttley

8th March 2024 at 7.30pm

‘It’s Goldscheider’s horn, golden and glorious, that properly takes the crown’
BBC Music Magazine

‘…seizing the music with amazing decisiveness… I would never have imagined a mere piano could have captured that world, but Richard Uttley’s tumultuous performance soon persuaded me.’
Ivan Hewett : The Daily Telegraph

Concert Review by Brian Newbould

Ben Goldschneider and Richard Uttley came to Scunthorpe with such glowing credentials that there was no cause to make allowances for their youth or the travails of a musician’s life on the road.  Their excellence showed itself especially in the second half of their programme, from the moment they launched into the Villanelle by Dukas, a breezy little piece by the composer perhaps already known to us by The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.  It is one of those pieces that makes untold demands on a hornist’s virtuosity and imagination, and this was a performance up with the best.  The duo continued with the only movement that was written of an intended horn sonata by Richard Strauss.  Published in 1973 and therefore unknown to those of us who were exploring music in the days of horn-legend Dennis Brain, it is a most promising piece and had flawless exponents in the hands of Goldschneider and Uttley.

York Bowen is a name little known today, except those taking instrumental examinations who may have come across his ‘grade pieces’.  A surprise was his Horn Sonata of 1937, the work of a late (out-of-his-time) Romantic maybe, but an accomplished three-movement piece which the artists played with such fire and commitment as to elevate the composer to a level with more celebrated names.

The concert had begun with an ideal opener in Beethoven’s Horn Sonata, played by both visitors with technical aplomb, if with an occasional agogic accentuation that tended to place the piece two or three decades later than its 1800 date.  It was particularly good to be reminded of the first movement’s second subject, with its surprise early modulation to an unexpected key.

Also included were Schumann’s Fantasiestücke, Op.73, always a delight though better known in the version for clarinet or cello.  Then came a work which will surely have been new to most in the audience, a substantial piece by Richard Uttley himself, entitled Aufschwung (‘Soaring’).  This turned out to be a major piece, pretty exhaustively exploiting the technical possibilities of both horn and piano, but at the same time crafting an impressive poetic soundscape that held us spellbound.  It says something for a new work (new to this reviewer, at any rate) that one would welcome a further hearing.

It was ideal planning for a wind-plus-piano recital to rest the horn and offer a solo piano piece in the middle of each half.  We were given the first piece of Schubert’s D.946 Klavierstücke in the first half, played true to style and cognisant of its rhythmic quirks, and in the second half something altogether more imposing, Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse.  The Watteau painting by which it was seemingly inspired –  L’Embarquement pour Cythère – depicts a departure for the island of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love.  Did our pianist, fearless in the face of Debussy’s technical demands, tend to underplay passing detail in a youthful eagerness to arrive at this wonderful island?  Perhaps so; but the re-arrival of the big A major theme towards the end was as powerfully satisfying as ever, and that is surely some sort of justification of the path taken to get there.

It was good that an encore allowed the event to close with the ringing tones of the horn reunited with the warmth of the piano, in the gorgeous slow movement of Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata, transcribed of course, but who will complain?