Attentive audience for concert

Perth Concert Hall welcomed tenor Nicholas Mulroy and pianist Alisdair Hogarth for the final lunchtime concert before Christmas, writes Ian Hunter.

Last year they gave a fine interpretation of Schubert’s Song Cycle Winterreise.

This year it was an even finer performance of Schubert’s earlier Die schöne Müllerin, The Fair Maid of the Mill.

Firstly, it was both beautifully played and sung.

Secondly, the pair brought deep understanding of this masterpiece and thirdly both were blessed with the ability to put this over to the large, attentive audience which the quality of Perth lunchtime concerts has attracted.

Nicholas’s tenor voice conveyed the youth and volatility of the miller lad, just how deeply he could take the slightest event to heart: from the ecstatic Ungeduld, the numbness of Die liebe Farbe, to the misery and fatality of Trockne Blumen.

Alasdair Hogarth was no mere accompanist, his scenesetting introductions and postludes always went appositely to the feeling of the song and its relationship to the whole.

Together they performed a sequence of really beautiful Lieder in the run from Ungeduld to Mein! Showing insight was their linking in anger as a continuous run the songs from Mit dem grünen Lautenbande to Eifersucht und Stolz.

Next year Schwanengesang,