Review: What’s a cough when Martha takes off?

I don’t remember a silence quite like last night’s packed Wigmore Hall. Mischa Maisky was back after prolonged illness with his career- long recital partner Martha Argerich and a youngish violinist, Yossif Ivanov.

Mischa, looking gaunt in a shroud-like, loose white shirt, played the first Bach cello suite with expressions of facial pain contradicted by sounds of celestial serenity. Martha, 83 years old, had no time to lose. She lit into the Bach C minor Partita before the seat-leather of the piano stool had felt her full weight. The lightness of her finger touch was ever a wonder of the world. Last night it was literally breathtaking.

Between movements, Martha coughed into a handkerchief. She was clearly unwell with a cold. Such was her spell that no-one in the audience gave a responsive cough. Martha looked up once or twice at the naked ladies in the Wigmore cupola overhead, as if to remind herself where she was and why it mattered. Only in the Wigmore Hall is such silence possible. Yes, it was still there.

In trios by Haydn and Mendelssohn the violinist Ivanov, a professor in Brussels, had his chance of stardom dimmed by two powerful personalities. He must have known what to expect.

The encore was a setting of Schubert’s song ‘Du bist die Ruh’, alternating violin and cello in the vocal line with Martha fluttering away, all smiles, her cough miraculously cured.

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