Danny Driver at the Menuhin Room

 Danny Driver, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, June 20

Danny Driver is a regular performer at Wigmore Hall so his return to the Menuhin Room, Portsmouth's answer to it, must have made him feel reasonably at home. 

Medtner's Second Improvisation, op. 47, is fifteen variations on a theme that come usefully with titles that both help the listener navigate their way through and provide clues as to what is being depicted. Thus, the haunting stillness of the Song of the Water-nymph was followed by flighty Winged Dances, the reveries of Enchantment, the reverberations of the Roar of the Crowd and the mysterious In the Forest. Comparisons might be made with his contemporary compatriot, Rachmaninov, but he's not so lush or self-indulgent. In an gripping realization of the final movements, Danny sustained the last note of the Storm into the conclusion where one could hardly help but hear what was surely a pointed inversion of Beethoven's 'fate motif' left wide open to one's choice of interpretation, if such it is.

Alert to all aspects of performance, Danny commented on how the intimacy of the venue made for a shared experience as he was aware of the audience involvement, something that was confirmed by some rare standing ovation at the end. The discerning clientele there don't give away such accolades lightly.

Beethoven's Sonata, op.111, was the last of his 32. The abrupt fortes of the Maestoso were followed by dash and dazzle although my approximate timing suggested Danny took nothing off the 26 minutes of the Stephen Kovacevich recording and might have been a fraction longer. The Adagio was in part slow dance and had passages of sustained exuberance but is dominated by a feeling of transcendence, of last words that were intended as the culmination of the vast cycle even if he was nowhere near the end of his life. Alfred Brendel said, 'what is to be expressed here is distilled experience' and one has a sense of being refined beyond existence, a profoundness that perhaps nobody does like Beethoven did in a handful of mostly 'later' works. Portsmouth is unlikely to witness it played with any more gentle authority and not many other places will either.

If that was Beethoven's farewell to the piano sonata after such a great and ground-breaking contribution then we might use the hyperbole of a comparison with the occasion of Andrew McVittie's similar farewell to the Menuhin Room Series in the hope and belief that it is not quite as final as Beethoven's was. It was noted that it is taking a committee of three to succeed him. While he will be missed, he won't be gone entirely and the Series resumes in the Autumn on the fourth Saturday of each month.