Local concert clubs are dying out, goes the story, and the days when they could afford major stars are long gone. Well, if that’s true, no-one sent Sutton Coldfield Philharmonic Society the memo.
Thanks to an energetic committee and a particularly persuasive chairman, the SCPS has brought off a series of major coups: booking Tasmin Little, Steven Osborne and Stephen Hough – artists who’d command a premium in New York or Vienna, performing on a Monday night in Sutton Town Hall.
Perhaps for that reason, this recital by Yevgeny Sudbin hadn’t caused quite the stir it merited – though it was nonetheless well-attended. Sudbin brought a programme of his own devising, a celebration (as he put it in his idiosyncratic self-penned programme notes) of “life and death and the delirium somewhere in between”. In practice that meant a first half devoted to Liszt: his Funérailles, the Petrarch Sonnet No.104 and two Transcendental Etudes.
And what sang out from the dark, swirling opening chords of Funérailles was the sense of an artist of quite extraordinary presence; an all-consuming urgency to communicate that felt almost physical in its intensity. Everything in Sudbin’s performance was carefully gauged; and the final climax of Funérailles showed reserves of power and tone that he had so far barely implied.
But there was, emphatically, nothing calculated about the expressiveness of Sudbin’s playing: whether in a pair of Scarlatti sonatas (one played with historically-informed chastity, the other with steel-fingered Romantic bravura), a performance of Debussy’s L’Isle joyeuse in which even the smallest bass phrase seemed to sing, and the concert’s predestined climax; Scriabin’s superheated Fifth Sonata, delivered with flying panache. It’s rare to feel an audience’s enthusiasm rising quite so obviously with each successive piece. The result was (by Sutton Coldfield standards) a truly thunderous ovation.
