Instead of their planned honeymoon in March the American violinist Elena Urioste and British pianist Tom Poster found themselves locked down in London. Unfazed, the newlyweds began carving out an online niche with their home produced #UriPosteJukeBox musical videos, whose optimism and eclecticism found an enthusiastic following. With characteristic smartness, the Wigmore Hall promptly added the couple to their autumn reopening concert roster. This concert showed they were right to do so.
Perhaps not surprisingly, marriage was the thread that bound the duo’s programme together in a deft mix of established and new works. The most substantial of the former category was the second of Grieg’s three violin sonatas, written on the composer’s own honeymoon in 1867, where the rapport between Urioste and Poster produced a performance that was carefree in the very best sense. Here, as in Clara Schumann’s three op22 Romances there was much to admire in the interplay between the warm lyricism of Urioste’s playing and Poster’s dextrous articulation at the keyboard. Messiaen’s Theme and Variations of 1932, written as a wedding present to the composer’s first wife, brought out the best in Urioste, as she allowed the long line of the rapturous final variation to unfurl with both control and eloquence.
The two new works, both commissioned during the lockdown by the couple, were strikingly effective in different ways. Mark Simpson’s An Essay of Love explored contrasting artistic moods brought on by the lockdown, moving from introspective to impassioned, before reaching a fragile resolution in delicate violin trills at the close.
Bha là eile ann – the Gaelic title translates as “there was a different day” – was an evocative Highland lament, written by the Elias Quartet violinist Donald Grant. Reminiscent of some of the harmonies and inflections of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Farewell to Stromness it nevertheless conveyed a sense all of its own of the human and spiritual losses inflicted by the pandemic.
• Available to stream on demand on Wigmore Hall or YouTube. Our critic watched the live stream of this concert.
