Gluzman/Moser/Sudbin, Wigmore Hall, London, review: Their concert as a whole was disappointing

Before the curtain rose at the Royal Opera last Wednesday, Antonio Pappano appeared on stage to announce – to gasps of dismay from the audience - that the evening’s performance would be dedicated to an artist who had died a few hours previously: the Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky. The memory of his great voice, said Pappano, would long resonate in the minds of all who had heard him. When violinist Vadim Gluzman introduced Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A minor at the Wigmore Hall two days later, he too announced that the performance would be dedicated to Hvorostovsky’s memory.

It’s a rare thing for a musician’s death to cast so long a shadow: Hvorostovsky had been suffering from brain cancer, but he was only 55 and there had always seemed something eternally youthful about him, despite the prematurely grey locks he traded on to theatrical effect. He wasn’t a great actor, and he always tended to play to the gallery, but his glorious sound and magnetic presence brought compelling magic to his Onegin, Boccanegra, and Germont père; in his song-recitals of the nineteenth-century Russian repertoire his golden tone was incomparable.

In the event, the Tchaikovsky work chosen by Gluzman, cellist Johannes Moser, and pianist Yevgeny Sudbin proved uncannily appropriate, since it ended with a haunting funeral march, but their concert as a whole was disappointing. Schubert’s Notturno in E flat was robbed of the mystery it should have come clothed in, by Sudbin’s relentless fortissimo. Arno Babadjanian’s rarely-performed Piano Trio came over as a strenuous pastiche of sundry mid-twentieth-century styles, Shostakovich’s prominent among them, and the Tchaikovsky lacked nuance.