INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL

positioned high up in the organ gallery, giving an immediate sense of the dramatic style conceived by Eliot Gardiner and co-director Elsa Rooke.

Utilising whatever the Usher Hall could offer, the chorus processed in from the stalls, singers appeared in lofty platforms, while at the centre of it all were the period instrumentalists of the English Baroque Soloists, split into two groups with the action taking place around them. A visual as well as musical delight, the sounds of strings mixed with recorders, cornettos and giant lute-like chitaronni had a glowing incandescence, Eliot Gardiner’s dignified pacing bringing crafted excitement to Monteverdi’s score.

If costumes looked like they’d come from a forgotten corner of the wardrobe store, the Monteverdi Choir’s singing was fresh and bright in compensation. Among the soloists, Krystian Adam was outstanding as an emotionally sensitive, and determined, Orfeo. CAROL MAIN Queen’s Hall JJJJJ Usually hearing Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition in its version orchestrated by Ravel, it is easy to forget that it was originally scored for piano. Paradoxically, in some ways less is more with the solo piano version, especially when played by a pianist who has the astonishing breadth of expression heard from Andreas Haefliger at the Queen’s Hall yesterday morning.

Not for the faint-hearted, this was a colossal performance in which the colours of Victor Hartmann’s pictures were boldly spray-painted across its ten movements, whether the thunderous witchery of Baba Yaga segueing into the majestic, powerful chords of The Great Gate of Kiev, the daring breakneck speed of The Market Place at Limoges or the dancing Unhatched Chicks.

Fluttering feathers were heard too in Liszt’s St François d’assise: La prédication aux oiseaux. Meticulously precise, the high register twitterings glistened as cascades of super-smooth ripples thrilled in a vivid outburst of virtuosity.

In an unanticipatedly linked-up programme, it was Berg’s first Piano Sonata, running the gamut of emotions in its concentrated single movement, that lay the foundation for what was to follow, including the exhilarating fugal themes of Beethoven’s A major Piano Sonata Op 101. CAROL MAIN