Brighton Fringe 2025
Yoko Ono Piano Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton
Yoko Ono
Genre: Live Music, Music
Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Fringe, Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
Yoko Ono long established in Brighton and particularly known for curating the Chapel Royal concerts, makes a very welcome return with a recital of Haydn, Scriabin, Chopin and Ravel, whose 150th anniversary falls this year.
Yoko Ono is a hidden gem of south-coast pianism.
Review
Yoko Ono long established in Brighton and particularly known for curating the Chapel Royal concerts, makes a very welcome return with a recital of Haydn, Scriabin, Chopin and Ravel, whose 150th anniversary falls this year.
She begins with Haydn’s Piano Sonata No.,60in D major Hb XVI/37. It’s quite late and laid out in the traditional three movements.
Being Haydn it’s not predictable for long. After a declamatory bright outburst in the D major key of optimism and ceremony, in Ono’s hands this energetic, swift and pointillistic Allegro con brio states themes and fires them off with high energy. And briefly.
The Largo e sostenuto then us all the more u expected. No restful Andante but a probing movement that almost comes to a halt. It’s extraordinary and again brief. No sooner has it drawn you in than the Presto ma non troppo kicks in. That marking seems a contradiction in terms. What happens is the slightly abrupt playfulness of the first movement comes back u n sudden stops and jumps. There’s Presto moments of dazzling speed but the overall pace is swervy and full of ‘suddenlys’. :it ends on a joyful fermata.
Scriabin write his Prelude and Nocturne in his favourite key if F sharp major Op 9 for left hand only when an injury to his right (practicing Balakirev’s fiendish ‘Islamay’) made him despair of writing again.. indeed he couldn’t for two years. Very early from around 1894, it certainly allows a little self-pitying lyricism.
But it is too full of the extraordinary qualities of early Scriabin, developing from Chopin (he kept the Collected Works under his pillow). Even with one hand the layering, loss and nostalgia than gazes away into the numinous is haunting. And it certainly doesn’t sound like one hand. Though Ono uses only one
The Nocturne though lambent in feel and wistful builds to an animated climax. It then draws down evoking the various stages. It almost ends in the highest long of the keyboard but comes to the middle for a rapt coda.
Chopin’s Nocturne in F sharp major Op 15/2 is quite early too. Around 1832 so Chopin was 22 as well. Chopin though was even more precious and original, and early maturity here is startling considering the music for piano if the time. Taking bearings from John Field’s Nocturnes Chopin far outstrips him even by his own Op 9. It’s prophetic indeed of Scriabin and that’s down to the key. Not common to Chopin but a favourite of Scriabin.
It’s still simpler, more John Field-like and simpler in construction than alter works. Yet the trills and gestures are clamouring to be let out. The stormy central section lets us know where Chopin will be going not least with some astonishing dissonances at the end.
Ravel’s Miroirs from 1905 is cast in five movements. Ono plays the middle three.
‘Oiseaux tristes’ treats of birds lost in a dark forest full of heat and danger. Ono is peculiarly attuned to this as to the Haydn, indeed all the works. But here her sense of the generous and foreboding captures the unusual undercurrents more sparkly than some. Her skill in brilliantly out contracts and clarity like the Haydn, shine out here. Gradations and outbursts ebb and wruot in a more dramatic reading than I’ve heard elsewhere. It remakes it .
‘Un barque sur l’ Ocean’ which like the next movement Ravel later orchestrated is a heaving seascape. Ono emphasizes the lightness of the spindrift opening. Then plunges through layers always in control of Ravel’s crystalline surfaces. And indeed momentum. This too is a work easy to swallow in, quite literally. Not here. The ecstatic trails at the he crest of the wave as the barque drops in further trills downwards is thrilling. And yet the darker palette is there too, raised out of thick impasto to glow with a visible knot of undertow.
‘Alborado del gracioso’ is a rude aubade from a jester. Its two-note jarring informs the whole and builds a Spanish soundscape beloved of French composers till their friend de Falla showed then he could do it even better himself. It’s enormous fun, full of strut and scampering, the sher braggadocio sweeps everything up in its refusal to be cowed; like a strutting peacock. That’s until its central section which seems to take us to some calm after the March. This dispels into a more ominous phase, as if something like a challenge has gone out. But the Jester returns in a splinter of sunlight. Yoko Ono is a hidden gem of south-coast pianism.
