Rising Stars

Benjamin Grosvenor and The ECO at the Cadogan

John Storgårds is a very lively conductor: I have never heard the orchestral passages in Chopin's Piano Concerto No 1 played with such fervour as on 23 March. Fortunately this was fully matched with Benjamin Grosvenor's work at the keyboard, which in the first two movements was often acutely expressive. In particular, the Larghetto had an almost ideal performance and it was only a pity that the final rondo was rather hard-driven, the soloist's passage-work often being dashed off too fast to make complete sense.

The ECO had begun with Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, which always conveys the bright, exhilarant impression of a fresh mind that was intelligent, disciplined as to invention and exuberant in utterance. The ensemble was sensitively balanced and Storgårds came close to evoking each of Shakespeare's characters in turn. Stephanie Gonley was the soloist in the Romances Opp.40 and 50 for violin and orchestra, uncharacteristically modest pieces from Beethoven. Her tone and phrasing were all they should have been and one did notice miniature versions of some of the composer's typical gestures in Op.50. Mendelssohn's Symphony No.4 Italian is full of highly characteristic ideas and Storgårds's reading well reflected the first movement's concise energy, clarity of musical thought and youthful high spirits. As ever, it emerged as a fizzing, joyful piece, especially the final Saltarello outburst of Neapolitan energy.

Max Harrison

The Richard Tauber Prize

Founded in 1950 to commemorate the great Austrian tenor Richard Tauber the singing prize, which bears his name, is now a biennial event and the public final round took place on 4 June at the Wigmore Hall. With preliminary auditions held in both London and Vienna, the final had the added attraction of including some Vienna-trained voices in its complement of ten.

In respect of the prize's longevity, it is instructive to pick out the past winners who have enjoyed long careers: Richard Angas, 1965; Robin Leggate, 1975; Claire Powell, 1978; Simon Keenlyside, 1986; William Dazeley, 1991; Catrin Wyn-Davies, 1993. One follows the burgeoning careers of more recent laureates with anticipation.

A notable feature of the 2008 list is that the first prize of £5,000, plus a London recital, went to the counter-tenor Christopher Ainslie, the first time that a voice of this category has been so honoured. With the huge growth of interest in music of the Baroque period, the counter-tenor voice has blossomed in both quantity and quality: Stefano Landi's 1634 opera Sant' Alessio, given last October at the Barbican used eight countertenors of wonderfully varied style. But it was as a character in a contemporary opera, Jonathan Dove's Flight, premiered at Glyndebourne in 1998, that Ainslie undoubtedly secured the prize. In the extract, the Refugee, stranded in the no-man's-land of an airport transit lounge, tells the harrowing story of escaping to freedom with his brother, stowed away in the wheel compartment of an aircraft, but only one of them survived the noise and the biting cold. Ainslie made every word tell, his focused singing painting a terrifying picture of their ordeal. Schubert's' Nachtstück which completed his programme was distinguished by the sensitivity of his interpretation. Both Ainslie and the winner of the second prize of £2,500, Sarah-Jane Brandon, hail from South Africa and trained at the Royal College of Music. After a finely judged Cäcilie by Richard Strauss, she revealed a soprano voice of exceptionally well rounded, shining tonal purity in a rapt performance of the water nymph's-Song to the Moon from Rusalka that distilled the character's other-worldliness. Hers is a voice that I look forward to hearing again.

Winner of the Adele Leigh memorial prize of £2,000 was the Swedish soprano Ida Falk Winland, who seemed to be forcing the volume unnecessarily for a hall of this size in an aria from Giulio Cesare, though she produced a firm lyrical line and used the words to good effect in Richard Strauss' Heimliche Aufforderung. The Schubert Society Lied prize of £500 went to the Vienna-trained Korean baritone Seho Chang for his stylish singing both of Schubert's Im Frühling and of Wolfram's song to the evening star from Tannhäuser, the words well enunciated, the, nut-brown quality of his voice pleasing to the ear. James Baillieu won the accompanist's prize of £1,000.

Margaret Davies

Daniel de Borah at the Wigmore

Hitherto I had felt Prokofiev's No 8 Op.84 to be the weakest of his so-called War Sonatas but, although I still consider No.6 the finest of them, Daniel de Borah on 6 June made me think again. Certainly No.8 is eventful enough with its long, unpredictably winding melodies, and the final Vivace, as brilliantly thrown off on this occasion, has something of the obsessive quality of No 7,s almost-notorious 7/8 Precipitato. In any case de Borah had begun well, playing the more decorative of Beethoven's two Op.51 Rondos, the G major, with grace and delicacy.

The second half of this concert, devoted to Chopin, was even better, starting with perhaps his most original single piece, the Polonaise-Fantasy Op 61. Again the technique was immaculate but the pianist's imaginative reaction to this complex music was the chief point. Richly coloured and zestful also was de Borah's view of three of the Opp 10 and 25 Etudes, especially the melody of the Più lento of Op 25 No 5 which he sang with a full heart. The treatment given the two glorious Nocturnes Op 62 was fully comparable, the pianism once more being without fault yet the main point was de Borah's response to Chopin's profoundly inward-looking thought in these two pieces. The 967 bars of the capricious Fourth Scherzo Op 54 were played at much the same level but there was no topping the Nocturnes.

Max Harrison