Mitsuko Uchida and Jonathan Biss: A thoughtful, extraordinarily detailed performance of Schubert piano duets

Mitsuko Uchida, Jonathan Biss

Whyte Recital Hall, Royal Irish Academy of Music

★★★☆☆

Mitsuko Uchida and Jonathan Biss’s evening of Schubert piano duets is the opening performance of the Royal Irish Academy of Music’s Wigmore Hall Festival, and therefore the official opening concert of Whyte Recital Hall, the 300-seat venue built as part of the academy’s €25 million campus development.

The auditorium provides a deja-vu moment for anyone who has been to the National Opera House, in Wexford. The immediate likenesses of the balcony’s design and use of wood are so thorough that it’s like meeting Wexford’s smaller sibling. The orange seating is firm, supportive and comfortable, and, with a 6ft frame, I experienced no issues with legroom.

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This opening concert is a rare opportunity to hear a full evening’s programme devoted to the piano duets of Schubert, who composed more than 50 pieces for what, in the concert hall, is one of the most unjustly neglected areas of repertoire. Understandably, perhaps, as four-handed music for piano was essentially a domestic enthusiasm. But then so were early string quartets, trios and duos.

Uchida and Biss offer four works. Three of them are among the best-known of Schubert’s duets: the surging, stormy, pathos-rich Allegro in A minor, D947, the altogether more fluid Rondo in A, D951, tinged with gentle, soothing balm, and the Divertissement à la Hongroise, D818, often as exotic and jaunty as the title sounds but also haunted by Schubertian darkness. To this they add an extended funeral march, the fifth from the set of six, D819. Biss plays the top part in the first half, Uchida in the Divertissement, which takes up all of the second half.

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The acoustics of the hall were designed by Bob Essert of Sound Space Vision. From where I am seated, almost on the aisle of the fourth row from the front, and well to the left of the piano, the experience is as puzzling as I’ve hand in a long, long time. First impressions are of an extraordinary dryness. Though I am not far from the piano, it is as if a curtain of some kind is preventing any real depth of sound or tonal richness reaching me.

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This feeling may be exacerbated by the use of a Steinway concert grand that has clearly seen better days, as well as by the duo’s fondness for using the instrument’s sustaining pedal as sparingly as possible, though this is actually an unimpeachable choice: four hands on one keyboard can all too easily sound horrendously clangorous.

The musical approach is spacious, thoughtfully analytical and extraordinarily detailed, and the acoustic does communicate the most delicate of utterances with unusual clarity. It is of course possible that the sonic dryness appealed to the players as a way of heightening the melancholy bleakness that Schubert made such a point of. The hall, which is one of a suite of new hireable spaces in the academy, has an adjustable acoustic. So the dryness is a choice, not a fixed part of the new venue’s character.

It’s going to be extraordinarily interesting to see how the festival’s upcoming range of musical combinations sound in the new space.

The next Wigmore Hall Festival concert, on Tuesday, September 12th, features the pianist Stephen Hough