Piano veteran Imogen Cooper delights Newbury with gems from Schubert to Ravel

Newbury Spring Festival: Imogen Cooper, piano, at the Corn Exchange, on Sunday May 8. Review by CHARLES MEDLAM

On Sunday afternoon at the Corn Exchange, piano veteran Imogen Cooper presented us with a finely-balanced programme of gems from Schubert to Ravel.

Cooper has made a special feature of Schubert in her work, and her sympathy for his special brand of melancholy, as well as an ability neatly to explain his forms, was on show from the very first bars of his sonata in A minor, written in 1825.

She lived Schubert’s story throughout with much smiling through tears, a semi-rustic Ländler and an affecting lullaby.

We jumped forward the best part of a century for Ravel’s 1906 Sonatine, which, true to its title, uses almost Mozartian forms while drawing on the keyboard styles of Couperin and Rameau. Cooper then presented us with two contrasting visions of how the piano can portray the play of light on water: Liszt’s Les jeux d’eaux à la villa d’Este and Ravel’s Jeux d’eau. Anyone who has visited the famous fountains in the gardens at Tivoli would have been transported back there during Cooper’s performance.

I almost had to brush the spray from my shoulders as she effortlessly dispatched this challenging tour de force.

And who could prevent French impressionist paintings from floating before their eyes during her rendering of Ravel’s astonishing aquatic masterpiece, which he himself described as “a river God laughing at the water which tickles him”?

His Valses Nobles et Sentimentales is a set of seven waltzes, some unbearably beautiful, others cheekily avant-garde, all exploiting the new sound world invented by Debussy and Ravel.

Piano music was changed for ever!

Cooper concluded her virtuoso odyssey with Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No.13 in A minor, in which he calls firmly on his father’s heritage, (his mother was Austrian).

We were served an impressive goulash of gypsy-fiddling, cimbalom playing (the Hungarian zither played with little hammers), quotes from Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen (gypsy melodies) and other highly impressionistic evocations of the plains of central-eastern Europe.

A thoroughly enriching afternoon.