Charlotte Gardner listens to the recital of Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Enescu and Brahms at London’s Wigmore Hall on 29 September 2025
Quietly easing himself into this Wigmore Hall lunchtime with tender, legato tread, Lawrence Power, together with pianist Ryan Wigglesworth, made a potent effect with his fragile, husky-toned viola in Tchaikovsky’s lovelorn 1870 song ‘None but the lonely heart’. The piece’s soft power only grew as the dialogue progressed.
Power switched to the violin for the 1934 Divertimento that Stravinsky fashioned from his ballet The Fairy’s Kiss for Samuel Dushkin. Similarly otherworldly, but now fairy tale-flavoured, the last of its four movements contains veiled quotations from ‘None but the lonely heart’.
Power and Wigglesworth emphasised these connections by running it almost seamlessly from the Tchaikovsky; then onwards into a reading brimming with contrasts between delicate whimsy and jauntier folkiness, songfulness smoothness and sheer energy. Their Pas de deux dialogue was irresistibly winsome.
Enescu’s 1906 Concertstück for the Paris Conservatoire viola concours was yet another chance for the pair to move seamlessly between dreaming and dancing. Then magical moments in Brahms’s Viola Sonata no.2 – the composer’s own idiomatic reworking from the clarinet original – not least the breath-catching hush with which Power closed its first movement, to Wigglesworth’s watchful support. Truly a restorative way to spend a lunch hour.
CHARLOTTE GARDNER
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