Madeleine Brown in Christ Church

Pianist Madeleine Brown graced Christ Church earlier today before a crowd of nearly 200 musical devotees who braved sunny Southport’s heat – and received, in recompense, one of the finest concerts of the season.

Her opening piece, «Darknesse Visible» by Londoner Thomas Adès, was a precise, heartfelt rendition of this 1992 work that seems to have as its subject-matter the materiality of the present: by this I mean that «Darknesse Visible» not only seems to escape generic classification, for its impressionistic, Ravelian first part is, if we’re to label it, post-postmodern; neo-romantic, perhaps, if it were out of context; but it is within context, and throughout it the schism that fights against labels grows. It’s a work that speaks to the now, to whatever this age of hashtags, thirty-second Instagram videos and compressed thought-by-label will be called by future philosophers: all diametrically (and thankfully) opposed to by «Darkness Visible», a «Gaspard de la Nuit» revisited, a piece about us and our time. If you truly want to make things philosophical, though, the question that remains to be pondered is whether the experience of listening to it together improved the piece or not– not unlike what one could ask of our daily existence.

The final piece, Schumann’s «Fantasy in C major», showcased Ms Brown’s layers of softer approaches, for the range displayed here, from the grandiloquent first movement to the subtle third, lulled the audience into diverse states, which went from heat-induced somnolence to talent-induced impromptu applause– fitting for a concert of this calibre on a day such as this.

Written the 24^th of June