Andrew Clements 

Till Fellner

Wigmore Hall, London
  
  


Bach's Two-Part Inventions are one of the cornerstones of piano literature. Almost every pianist will have learned a few. Yet they rarely appear in recital programmes, and even then are usually superseded by selections from their grander, more ambitious siblings, the 48 Preludes and Fugues.

Till Fellner, however, included all the inventions in his Wigmore appearance, playing them in the alternating major-minor key sequence that Bach finally settled upon. Because the pieces were written for fingering practice, the more difficult keys were omitted - the key signatures never venture beyond four sharps or flats - and so there are just 15 of them, rather than the 24 there would be if all the keys were included.

Fellner played them with the unselfconscious naturalness that characterises all his Bach, allowing plenty of space to the pieces that plumb greater expressive depths, such as the F minor, and giving the breezier numbers a buoyant athleticism. They followed an equally muscular account of Beethoven's G major Piano Sonata, Op 31 No 1, which exploded into life right from the jokey, out-of-synch opening chords and never faltered. Schumann's Kreisleriana presents a different set of challenges: there were moments when it remained earthbound, the rhythms brusque, the poetry strictly by the book.

Into this mainstream sequence Fellner inserted some Elliott Carter. Composed in 1994, 90+ was Carter's 90th-birthday tribute to his friend and fellow composer Goffredo Petrassi, in which a sequence of 90 accented pitches is surrounded by a slowly mutating sequence of chords. It's an exquisite miniature, which Fellner played with penetrating seriousness and technical command; he really should play more contemporary music.

 

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