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I have heard Hao Zi Yoh  play many times and I am always glad to attend her concerts in the many churches and halls that give a platform to these gifted young performers whilst they are perfecting their quite considerables skills here in London.

I was rather surprised when Hao Zi sent me a last minute invitation to a recital in St James’s Piccadilly.

These are uncertain times with the Corona virus taking an ever stronger hold of our lives.In fact a concert by a chamber orchestra from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama had been cancelled as the School has also been closed due to this scare.A scare that is fast dominating our lives ,not only for the uncertainty and worries for health issues but also for our educational,cultural and spiritual welfare.Could Hao Zi take over at the last minute to offer some music to the vast audience that still overflows this most beautiful of churches a stone’s throw from Piccadilly Circus?

However out of bad comes some good and we were able to applaud Hao Zi’s quite considerable artistry before she embarks on a tour of Spain for the Keyboard Charitable Trust .Her programme for Spain consists of two of the most difficult pieces for piano:Feux Follets and Gaspard de la Nuit.Today she had decided to offer works by Haydn,Brahms and Chopin .Musically equally  as demanding though.

The little Haydn Sonata in C Hob XVI-48  in two movements.It immediately established her musical credentials demonstrating her intelligent musicianship and untrasensitivity.The first movement ‘Andante con espressione’ could not have been more expressive but within a rhythmic framework with some very subtle phrasing.So beautifully and delicately shaped with such fantasy but without ever loosing sight of the overall shape and direction of this remarkable movement.She immediately drew us in to her extraordinarily sensitive  world of fantasy and exquisite piano playing.The Rondo I found a little too fast for this church acoustic and the faster passages lost something of that precision of which other lady performers like Maria Joao  Pires and  Alicia de Larrocha were masters.

Her playing did in many respects though remind me of the playing of Maria Joao Pires for its clarity and delicacy allied to extreme musical intelligence.

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And it was this very rare talent that allowed her to shape the four Klavierstucke op 119 by Brahms with such sumptuous sound.Ranging from the most delicate to the most robust but never loosing that radiance and feeling that the roots are very firmly placed in the bass.

This was the last work for solo piano by Brahms and received its premiere in London in 1894 .Brahms had written to Clara Schumann about the elusive first Intermezzo in B minor: “I am tempted to copy out a small piano piece for you, because I would like to know how you agree with it. It is teeming with dissonances! These may well be correct and can be explained—but maybe they won’t please your palate, and now I wished, they would be less correct, but more appetizing and agreeable to your taste. The little piece is exceptionally melancholic and ‘to be played very slowly’ is not an understatement. Every bar and every note must sound like a ritardando, as if one wanted to suck melancholy out of each and every one, lustily and with pleasure out of these very dissonances! Good Lord, this description will surely awaken your desire!”Clara Schumann was enthusiastic and asked him to send the remaining pieces of his new work.

Hao Zi  brought a beautiful stillness to this first Intermezzo. Revealing some of the extraordinary  inner secrets that Brahms had obviously added for  those like his adored  Clara with the soul to seek them out!It is extraordinary how the inner meaning of these pieces as in those of Chopin transcends all frontiers. We can find musicians a long way from where these pieces were written  with a deep understanding of their inner depths.

I remember Fou Ts’0ng explaining that the beauty in chinese poetry was so similar to the poetry found in the works of Chopin.And so it was today that this beautiful young Malaysian pianist could understand and transmit so movingly these last romantic confessions of Johannes Brahms.The second Intermezzo in E minor was played with a great sense of character and range of dynamics as it revealed a real miniature tone poem.The third in C major, that was so much a piece for the hands of Curzon, was played today with such infectious rhythmic energy and subtle colouring with the ending thrown off with the same beautifully knowing nonchalance as Curzon.All with a minimum use of the sustaining pedal and it gave a clarity to music that can in so many lesser hands be a cloudy mess.The mighty Rhapsody in E flat revealed the enormous sounds that this waif of a pianist had up her sleeve when needed.A wonderful sense of balance allowed the magical central lyrical section a unique voice that took us into the exhilarating almost orchestral sounds of the finale as the excitement mounted to almost fever pitch.

Three mazukas op 59 were played with such subtle understanding and delicacy.It was almost a shame that applause interrupted the sheer magic  created before the opening of the Fourth Ballade op 52.

This was a monumental performance of one of the greatest works in the piano repertoire.It was played with an aristocratic nobility but a sensitivity to sound that made one realise what Cortot meant when he said:’ avec un sentiment de regret’ at the return of the opening heartbeating repeated notes.A magical cadenza brought us to the main theme seemingly lost until it found its way with such swirling mists of sound and a gradual magisterial build up to the final explosion and the five redeeming chords that seem to find such peace after  such a storm of romantic passion. The transcendentally intricate coda that follows was indeed breathtaking in Hao Zi’s hands.It was played with an unrelenting forward propulsion that did not exclude the most intricate shaping of this extraordinary after thought of pure genius.

Christopher Axworthy noting the details of the encore played by Hao Zi Yoh at her piano recital today as part of the

Concerts at St James’s Church, Piccadilly.

In fact “A Distant Voice in the Rainforest” by Ng Chong Lim 
Documented  by Geoff Cox the tireless promoter of young musician without whom we would never know where and when they were all playing.

Geoff Cox- caught by me this time –  a retired chemistry teacher who has become the tireless PR man of  so many young musicians.

An extraordinary encore for an extraordinary concert.The piece by a co-national had her wailing and flaying her arms as she produced such

magic both inside and out from this true Pandora’s box.

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I just wish I could hear her Feux Follets and Gaspard in Spain next week.I am sure that the Corona virus will not have spread its wings as far as the wilds of Malaga so she can enchant the local people with the same magic with which she enchanted us today.

Uncovering mistakes in Beethoven’s manuscript

Beethoven scholar Jonathan Del Mar delves deep into the history of the composer’s manuscripts to uncover the secrets hidden within…

Beethoven’s symphonies and string quartets are accepted to be the bedrock of Western classical music; so would you be shocked to learn that the printed editions of cornerstone works such as the Fifth Symphony and the Violin Concerto are littered with mistakes? For example, the famous French horn calls after the Turkish March in the ‘Choral’ Symphony are not quite what Beethoven wrote, while the version we’ve been handed down of his last string quartet, Op.135, is a hotchpotch compared with the great man’s original intentions. 

None of this comes as a surprise to Beethoven editor Jonathan Del Mar who, for the past 20 years, has been forensically unpicking manuscripts to discover where “real” Beethoven ends and historical distortion begins. To many, Del Mar is Beethoven’s earthly representative and his Editor-in-Chief, an awesome responsibility that he takes in his stride.

“I once did an interview in Hamburg,” he chuckles, “and the journalist asked ‘if Beethoven symphonies are the Bible, are you the Pope?’ This sort of thing is nonsense. My editions are about making life easier for musicians. I have to admit that average concert-goers might not even notice my corrections. My editions were born out of problems such as a clarinetist putting his hand up and asking ‘is that an A or a G?’ Orchestral time is incredibly expensive and my work allows musicians to forget about the text and get on with the music.” 

Del Mar operates out of a beautiful house in Clapham, London, that’s stuffed to the ceiling with Beethoven facsimiles and first editions. His upstairs den has an air of 221b Baker Street as he unearths the tools of his trade – paperweights, magnifiers and slim-line torches that illuminate manuscripts from underneath.

We’re looking at the facsimile of Beethoven’s autograph score for the Choral Symphony.

“There’s some weird and wonderful things here. By the time Beethoven’s copyist has produced a neat copy, the material in the French horns [Del Mar sings what’s in Beethoven’s original manuscript] has become this. You see – there are notes tied over the barline in Beethoven’s manuscript, but not in the copyist’s hand.” 

Next we take a look at the Fifth Symphony, and again there are shocking discrepancies between the subtleties of Beethoven’s original and the published version. “You can see clearly how Beethoven has corrected and revised what his copyist wrote, but these changes have still been overlooked.”

The notation a composer deploys is distinctive, like a Picasso brushstroke. In these few bars of the Fifth, Del Mar points out just how refined Beethoven’s instructions are for his strings, with regard to how they should sustain a note. Above, the wind are stabbing away with violent staccatos. Beethoven’s notation – now restored – demonstrates a dramatic clash of material more vividly than the vanilla version that has existed since the copyist’s misreading. Beethoven’s Fifth becomes a better piece. 

“There’s a note I’ve corrected in the Choral Symphony that Claudio Abbado refuses to acknowledge,” Del Mar reveals. “But he must accept that he’s playing a note that was changed in the 1860s, some 30 years after Beethoven’s death. Simon Rattle phoned me about the French horns in the same symphony, and asked: ‘What am I going to tell the orchestra?'”

The humble copyist – the packhorse employed to copy Beethoven’s autograph score into neat – is getting bad press here. Are they the bane of Del Mar’s life? 

“I have to think myself back to the conditions under which they operated. They were working by candlelight in freezing cold conditions, probably at some ungodly hour, so it’s no surprise they made mistakes. Beethoven would get furious if they ignored his corrections. He’d scratch in the margin ‘You damn fool’, and I don’t blame him – he had better things to do.” 

That nobody had thought to correct Beethoven’s scores before is puzzling. Del Mar explains that the realisation that all was not well with present editions grew through the 1930s. But at this time Beethoven’s manuscripts were scattered around the globe in private collections. Then the Second World War broke out and the Nazis compounded difficulties for scholars by shipping scores, owned by the German state, to Poland for safe-keeping, many of which didn’t resurface until the 1960s and 1970s. 

Del Mar inherited from his father, the British conductor Norman Del Mar, his suspicion that printed scores aren’t necessarily tablets of stone.

“My father wrote a book called Orchestral Variations in which he discusses discrepancies in modern published scores,” he recalls. “He bought a facsimile of the autograph of Beethoven’s Ninth from a second-hand music shop in 1949, and that became my starting point. As my wife always complains, I have to do things to the absolute limit, so I had to investigate further. Waking up every morning knowing that I’m going to spend my day with this fabulous music is just wonderful, and I feel very honoured to be doing this fascinating work.” 

Beethoven Op. 135: an unsolved case?

Despite being regarded as one of Beethoven’s most profound masterpieces, and having been recorded many times, his final string quartet is not considered “definitive”, as Jonathan Del Mar explains… 

“The Op. 135 string quartet will always be a mystery because Beethoven didn’t finish his thoughts on the piece. There’s the autograph score as you would expect, but normally he’d have given this to a copyist whose responsibility was to prepare a part for each individual player and then send those parts to the publisher. 

“However, he couldn’t find a trustworthy copyist, so he wrote the parts himself. Beethoven’s mind was so fertile that in the process of copying the parts he had second thoughts.

“For example, he altered rhythms but sometimes only in one violin part – the other he would forget about. So we’re in the unique position with Op. 135 of a score that’s been superseded by a set of parts. The version that players have used since the 1860s is based on the score, and editors have ignored the parts. 

“It all works as an edition and is consistent – but it’s not the piece Beethoven intended. His mind had moved on.”

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