Brighton Year-Round 2024

Berniya Hamie Piano Recital St Nicholas Church

Berniya Hamie

Genre: Live Music, Music

Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

A core classical recital is something of a rarity. Mozart and Schubert are natural but not always frequently-seen contrasts.

Berniya Hamie is a graduate student at Guildhall but has already appeared across the UK: for instance at the Wigmore Hall and in Radio 3 last April. She’s a member of the award-winning Astatine Piano Trio who won amongst other things a Britten Pears Foundation.

Mozart’s F major Piano Sonata K332 (possibly from 1778-9) is one of his most ebullient and mature sonatas, bar a few very different late works. This particularly in its finale pre-echoes Beethoven in its casual grandeur, its amplitude and its crescendo arrival.

The opening Allegro is deceptively conversational then grounds you in thematic development and potent contrapuntalism. The Adagio is quite unexpected, mining depths the pastoral F major didn’t see coming. A sideline into self-doubt and probing rhythms is haunting

The Allegro assai finale with its crescendo and qualities associated with Beethoven’s Op.2 and 10 finds Hamie on top form too. The unexpected wit continues right till the end as the ebullience if the opening is trumped by ever-increasing excitement and sudden harmonic twists.

Finally the work, instead of ending grandly, ends in a question-mark Hamie makes mischievous but simple use of in a sudden diminuendo. Worthy of Haydn its jokiness caught everyone off guard. They didn’t know where to put their hands.

Schubert’s D899 Impromptus from 1827 feature the almost shy opening of the first in C minor, marked Allegro molto moderato which gives only a hint of the strange destination with which this unwinds. It soon rises in Hamie’s hands to several crescendo-like moments, yet still unravels. Hamie seems a natural Schubertian, tracing Schubert’s often consolatory starkness with exquisite rubato and scale of sound.

It’s extraordinary to realise only the first Impromptu is in the nominal minor key. Schubert is famed for making the major tragic, but his shadowed braiding of major and minor is equally singular, not caught up with till the 20^th century.

The Allegro in E flat major is one of the quirkiest things Schubert wrote. A kind of wayward scherzo, it spins down and up the page till a sudden fermata statement in the minor, a development of dark passions and crunchy chromatic chords that sound half-joke, half- menace. These fantastic un-awkward grotesqueries form a refrain to the filigree spinning elsewhere. Hamie revels in all this. The end like that of his 1823 song Auf dem Wasser zu singen D. 774 (with its A flat minor radiant, and heartbreaking apotheosis in A flat major) is declamatory and hints at tragedy. And resolve.

The hymn-like Andante in G flat major is like a supplication after that. It preludes the acceptance in Schubert’s penultimate Sonata in A major, D959. It’s not quite a song without words but Mendelssohn would have recognized. Of course there’s a Trio undertow waiting to take you under to a quiet welter of griefs.

The final Allegretto in A flat major returns but far more gently to the skittering of the Allegro, but tempered with a call and refrain that brings an immediate contrast.

In fact this proceeds like a kind of joyous spring song with a middle section of ecstatic acceptance of whatever the world brings.

The repeated broken phrase of rapid figures themselves ride to a crescendo and with even the minor and indeed major trekking of melancholy not far off, this seems like an affirmation singing before the blast of a storm. It rises to a final pitch and bursts in wonder.

Hamie is here a consummate Schubertian and her way with finding the heft in Mozart’s F major proves compelling and quietly revelatory. A rapt recital and true musician it’s been a pleasure to discover. We will be hearing much more of Hamie in future.

Published November 20, 2024 by Simon Jenner