Elena Fischer-Dieskau (piano)Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham. 11 February 2024. 4✩✩✩✩ Review: William Ruff.

Nottingham

Elena Fischer-Dieskau (piano)

Royal Concert Hall, Nottingham

11 February 2024

4✩✩✩✩ Review: William Ruff.

“A pianist who brings vivid story-telling to some unusual repertoire.”

I can’t decide whether having a really famous family member is a boon or a burden. All cases are different, of course, but if you have chosen a similar career to your celebrated forebear, your name is clearly going to be noticed. Sunday’s pianist, Elena Fischer-Dieskau is the granddaughter of one of classical music’s legends, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the German baritone, the yardstick against whom all other male singers of art songs and opera are compared. That is quite a family name to live up to, especially for another musician.

Elena, however, is her own woman, stamping a very individual personality on the programme chosen for her RCH recital. The first composer on the menu was one just about no one in the audience will have heard of: Mel Bonis (1858-1937), a French woman who dared to be a composer in a society which thought that writing music was for men whilst the women ran the home and looked after the children. Even her chosen name Mel was an attempt to disguise the fact that her ‘real’ name was Mélanie.

Amongst the 300 pieces she wrote was the set of seven portraits of female characters called Femmes de Légende, encompassing such women as Ophelia, Desdemona and Salome. Each piece tells a story and Elena is clearly in her element when painting vivid portraits. The Ophélie portrait evoked watery images of death by drowning, as well as Ophelia’s fragile beauty. The Desdémona picture was less specific, conveying a mood of sadness and of the destruction of innocence. Perhaps the most memorable piece was Salomé, whose seductive dancing earned the reward of John the Baptist’s head. Elena’s portrayal of the character’s rapid mood-swings from charm to menace was painted in darkly disturbing colours.

The rest of the programme brought similarly vivid story-telling. Schumann’s Waldszenen (‘Forest Scenes’) is a set of nine musical snapshots of nature as something beautiful yet unknowable, a wilderness that affects the way in which humans view themselves. Again there were some lovely contrasts in Elena’s playing. Just take the sequence where the beauty of ‘Solitary Flowers’ turns into the sadness and unease of ‘Haunted Spot’ which in turn leads to the entirely different mood of ‘Friendly Landscape’. Such changeability calls for the quickest of reactions and the subtlest of nuances, qualities which were in abundance in Elena’s performance.

The recital ended with two of Rachmaninov’s Moments Musicaux: No 3, (poignant, mournful with more than a hint of the funeral march) and No 4 (an exhilarating musical tempest in which fistfuls of notes are hurled like thunder bolts from a dark sky). The exact stories these two pieces tell is left to the listener’s imagination; however, Elena Fischer-Dieskau’s creation of purely musical imagery could hardly have been more suggestive or more infused with vivid colour.

Elena Fischer-Dieskau, playing in the Sunday Piano Series at Nottingham’s Royal Concert Hall