EIF Music reviews: Leonard Elschenbroich & Alexei Grynyuk | Hanni Liang

Leonard Elschenbroich & Alexei Grynyuk

Queen’s Hall

★★★★☆

In what was quite an unusual cello and piano recital at the Queen’s Hall yesterday, in that three out of the four pieces were not originally composed for this pairing, it is perhaps unsurprising that the one always intended for cello stole the show. Nonetheless, hearing arrangements of troubled works by Clara Schumann for violin, her husband Robert for oboe, and a late cycle of songs by Brahms, helped to put the latter’s Cello Sonata No 2 in a fresh perspective.

Here, more than anywhere else, Elschenbroich and Grynyuk showed themselves as a strong, solid partnership. Matching and balancing each other across the Allegro vivace’s sweeps of emotion, or the long, stretched out, melodic lines of the Adagio, Grynyuk was so much more than an accompanist with Brahms’ soloistic writing for both instruments bringing triumph to the music and their performance of it.

In contrast, his Four Serious Songs were melancholy and mournful. Like the two Schumanns’ sets of three Romances, they gave opportunity to hear Elschenbroich’s rich, luxurious cello tone in their anguished despair and Grynyuk’s open flowering of the piano part as romantic-era lyricism batted back and forth between the two musicians.

CAROL MAIN

READ MORE: The best EIF classical concerts - Scotsman critic David Kettle previews the 2025 programme

Hanni Liang: Dreams

The Hub

★★★☆☆

Any psychoanalysts in the audience must have had a field day. According to the dreams that festival audiences are willing to share with their peers, they’re obsessed with animals (from talking cats to flying axolotls to Harris the Highland Cow), they’re joyful about impending marriage but fearful of a partner two-timing them, and they still haven’t recovered from the trauma of university exams decades earlier.

That much was evident from pianist Hanni Liang’s Dreams project, in which, taking Debussy’s Reverie as a starting point, the German pianist improvised a continuous score alongside stories, drawings and more of audience members’ dreams, delivered via iPads and projected atmospherically behind her. It’s a sweet idea, and it proved thoroughly entertaining, even if – truth be told – the main interest came from the dream descriptions rather than from Liang’s improvisations, which provided more of a generic, soft-focus sonic backdrop than a direct response to images or ideas from audience members’ subconsciouses.

She’s undeniably a fluent, inventive improviser, with an enjoyable lightness of touch in her flights of pianistic fancy, and she channelled Rachmaninov and Scriabin, Messiaen and Debussy (lots of Debussy) in her wide-ranging playing. A closer connection between the stories and the musical responses, though, might have transformed a diverting evening into something more revealing.

DAVID KETTLE

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