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Reviews
Fiona Hook, The Evening Standard, January 5th 2001
A SCHUBERT INDULGENCE, FROM CRADLE TO GRAVE
Most of us don't know what we'll be doing three years from now. Pianist James Lisney, on the other hand,
has tied himself down to a series of Purcell Room concerts presenting all Schubert's major piano works
in chronological order, interspersed with anything else that takes his fancy.
The rationale behind this is "very much an indulgence for my own enjoyment" - the best of all
possible reasons for playing anything, and the artist's obvious pleasure in his work wasn't the
least attractive feature of last night's concert. So eager was he to get on with the music that
he scarcely acknowledged the applause.
Another great virtue was a rotund sense of phrasing, a grasp of where the line was going, and
a familiarity with the overall architecture of a movement that powered his phrases and made the
odd technical slip irrelevant.
The first movement of Schubert's Sonata in E, written, like the evening`s other two works, when
he was a mere teenager, was alive with naughty joy, its recurring series of grace notes popping off
the keyboard like tiny farts through bathwater. The following slow movement eschewed any self-indulgent
tendency to drag. It was a proper Andante, in Lisney`s hands obviously composed by a man who
also wrote songs. In the Sonata in C's robust Menuetto we glimpsed a much younger pianist, a
10-year-old rollicking through the dance, its cadential cross rhythms thumped out for the admiration
of a circle of aunties. He doesn't bang any more, but the joie de vivre is still there.
Post-interval, we heard a piano quartet by the adolescent William Walton, in which those playing
'spot the influence' could pick up Elgar, Ravel, Debussy and Stravinsky. Lisney was an unobtrusive
and tactful ringmaster for three string players who conveyed the music's sophistication without
sacrificing its optimism.
Geoffrey Norris, The Evening Standard, January 8th 2000
PROMISING START TO A PIANISTIC JOURNEY
No doubt with thoughts of Schubert's Winterreise in the back of his mind, the
pianist James Lisney has just begun a winter journey of his own - a
"Schubertreise" of the composer's piano sonatas. There will be five recitals in
all, stretching, in fact, through all four seasons until the end of the year.
The sonatas are being set among the music of other composers who provide a
complementary context, and in the first concert Walton's Piano Quartet was the
foil to Schubert's Sonatas in E major D157 and C major D279, and the Ten
Variations D156.
The link here was youth. Both composers were in their teens, Walton up at
Oxford in 1918, Schubert already astonishingly prolific in the Vienna of 1815.
Neither of Schubert's two sonatas written in that year possesses a finale, but
there is sufficient music to reveal a precociously distinctive slant on the
lingua franca of the day. Facets of texture, surprising twists and turns in the
harmony, irregular accents and a pronounced melodic felicity all hint at
features that were to become much more prominent later on, when Schubert found
in the sonata genre a vehicle for more profound thinking than was the case in
these early essays.
Lisney's stylish playing kept the music in perspective, pointing up its
personal traits without overstating them, and, in the Ten Variations, exercising
a lively virtuosity that illuminated Schubert's technical and decorative
panache. The Walton Piano Quartet, for which Lisney was joined by the violinist
Paul Barritt, viola-player Yuko Inoue and cellist Charles Medlam, is a
comparably prentice piece. It occasionally presages the elan of such works as
the iconoclastic Faade that was to follow only three years later, but more often
looks for inspiration to the French school of Ravel.
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