"Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata sounded newly minted... approached with gently commanding poise and improvisatory freshness." — Paul Conway
Cheltenham’s Pittville Pump Room was the elegant setting for a judiciously chosen programme of piano music played by Clare Hammond on 13 July as part of the town’s annual music festival.
Clara Schumann’s Three Romances, Op.21 (1853) benefitted from Clare Hammond’s searching, freely expressive approach to her craft. There was an unforced depth of feeling to the opening Andante, with its flowing central episode bringing warmth as well as vitality. The touching central Allegretto deftly avoided sentimentality, thanks in part to the pianist’s crisply rhythmic articulation. Her persuasively brisk tempo for the outer portions of the final Agitato made a satisfying emotional contrast with the more introspective, slower middle passage. Revealing without point-making, this carefully considered interpretation subtly underlined the music’s scope and scale.
Two late Nocturnes by Fauré followed. No.12 in E minor was cogently paced and evocatively treated, with an acute sense of unease underlying the shadowy, sultry textures. The elliptical No.8 in D flat major made a rewarding pairing, its delicate theme precisely etched out from within the swirling semiquaver figuration.
New music has always played a key role in Clare Hammond’s repertoire and her recital included the world premiere of a work written especially for her and the Cheltenham Music Festival. Commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society, Sun Keting’s Us, the most fleeting of all (2024) was inspired by lines from the ninth of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies that welcome fleeting, unrepeatable moments of existence. Hence, the music is, in the composer’s own description, ‘a celebration of the ephemeral beauty of life and time’. Ideally suited to Clare Hammond’s naturally fluent, at times almost liquid, pianism, Sun Keting’s set of four intricately woven, toccata-like transcendental studies beguiled the listener with hypnotically recurring motifs and patterns. In this elegantly rhapsodic first performance, the filigree writing’s technical challenges and the expressive demands of creating and sustaining a precise mood were sublimated into a compelling reading of numinous intensity.
Closing the concert’s first half, Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata No.14 in C sharp minor, Op.27, No.2 sounded newly minted. The celebrated, veiled opening movement was approached with gently commanding poise and improvisatory freshness. After a gracefully executed, carefully weighted central Allegretto, the turbulent finale was delivered at white heat and marked by depth of feeling.
After the interval, Mozart’s Sonata in D major, K.311 received a vividly expressive performance, the central Allegretto’s radiant lyricism offset by the outer fast movements’ airy exuberance.
An engaging sequence of French music ensued. Book 1 of Debussy’s Images tempered absolute precision with delicacy and refinement. Cécile Chaminade was represented by an aptly spontaneous-sounding rendering of the ‘Impromptu’ from the composer’s Op.35 set of Étude de concerts and a playful, feather-light account of the Étude romantique, Op.132. Debussy’s spirited L'Isle Joyeuse made a bravura conclusion to the official programme.
After a well-deserved, warmly appreciative response from the capacity audience, Clare Hammond responded with an encore in the form of another world premiere. Written expressly for the pianist, Kenneth Hesketh’s delightfully silvery miniature Le Jongleur Joue, Les Cloches Sonnent (2024) featured the intermittent sounding of a desk bell by the pianist. Its mischievous high spirits and free-flowing discourse chimed perfectly with much of the rest of the programme and provided an ideal way to ring down the curtain on a recital of notable quality and variety.