This well attended and enthusiastically-applauded lunchtime recital formed part of a weekend mini-festival at the Pump Rooms, featuring major works by Mozart and Schubert.
Martin Roscoe is a pianist of power and sensitivity and this was music-making on an intimate scale yet with power in reserve when needed.
Mozart's Fantasia in D minor, K397 provided a concise opening work, true to the tradition of its genre, marked by changing moods and an improvisatory character.
The Sonata in A minor K310 followed in a dramatic and purposeful performance, with an air of anxiety as well as poetry. The slow movement was full of the most varied sorts of decoration, whilst being both spacious and thoughtful, before the finale returned to the mood of turbulence and tragedy.
There are occasions when one is present at a 'magic moment' that lifts a concert performance out of the ordinary and on to a higher plane, that resounds in the memory long after the concert. Such a moment was the superb control and balance that marked the sublime second movement of Schubert's last Sonata in Bb D960.
Its timeless poise and unhurried unfolding underlined its kinship with that other Schubert masterpiece, the C major string quintet.
This was an inspired performance, Roscoe playing to himself with us as privileged onlookers.
The concentration of the audience could have been an example to some of the more bronchial audiences of Symphony Hall, as no-one dared move or make a sound.
The mood altered only as a quicksilver Scherzo followed and then the finale, capped with its sudden presto coda, bringing to an end a performance of great subtlety and polish.
John Gough
