A week of sumptuous music making live from the Wigmore Hall  had started on Monday with Stephen Hough  https://christopheraxworthymusiccommentary.wordpress.com/2020/06/01/4406/

And now some more  superb playing from these two young pianists united for the first time during their student days at the R.C.M in the class of Norma Fisher.

There could be no great compliment than saying that they played as one.

From a selection of Brahm’s Liebeslieder they were united immediately in a passionate involvement in which the full blooded Brahm’s sound may have resounded around an empty hall but it certainly filled our homes with sumptuous sounds that we have been too long without.

                                                                                 

A heartfelt confession in the Impromtu in A flat D 935 from Samson was the antidote to the great romantic effusions that they had immersed us in from the very first notes of this short recital.

In Samson’s hands a very poetic self comuning was touchingly comunicated and the music allowed to speak so eloquently.It was followed so attentively by his partner Pavel seated on stage but away from the piano.

It was Samson’s deeply felt playing that made such a contrast to the rumbustuous 8 variations by Beethoven on a theme by Count Waldstein that followed. A new piece to me and played with great rhythmic impetus on a totally united front not missing also the sense of humour and charm that Beethoven was also capable of as we know from the Bagatelles.

                                                                                 

After this unexpected intrusion from Beethoven in his 250 anniversary year it was Samson’s turn to sit the next dance out.

Pavel now alone at the keyboard played a selection of six German dances by Schubert .Samson looked on with such attention at the startling orginality that his partner is capable of even in the simplest of seeming pieces.A subtle sense of colour and shape brought these carefully chosen dances to life and were the perfect preparation for Schubert’s masterpiece that is the F minor fantasy D 940.

Written in the last months of his life it is pure magic.

                                                                                     

“In the beginning is our end” says Borges and it is the etherial melody floating into the rarified air that returns at the end of twenty minutes of sublime music that creates such a satisfying and moving shape.

A journey of a lifetime that takes in the etherial and the material.The most profound with the most joyous.The most noble with the most whispered utterances.

A journey that our two young musicians took us on fearlessly as the Allegro moderato melody created by Samson was allowed to float on the magic carpet of sound created by his partner,Pavel.

Sometimes their passionate involvement made them hurry where they could have taken even more liberty but the magic they created was quite memorable.

                                                                                     

The whispered comments at the top of the piano from Samson were a moving reply to Pavel’s subtle utterings from below.

The Largo was played with all the tragic nobility that Schubert was capable of in his last year of so many sublime creations.

The Scherzo was perhaps a little too Allegro vivace to allow the same charm that Pavel had brought to the little dances earlier.But it was played with a great sense of jewel like sparkle and precision that contrasted so well with the fugue that follows.

It was here that their acute sense of balance and united musicianship gave great strength to the tumultuous build up until the cloud bursts to reveal the marvels that only Schubert could show us in his last utterances of his all too short life.

The encore of the last piece from Ravel’s Ma Mère L’Oye was pure magic .A fairy garden indeed full of delicate sounds but an inevitable forward movement to the magical glissandi that fill Ravel’s garden with gold and silver bells.Revealed so movingly in the deeply sensitive hands of this magnificent duo.