Beautiful concert for Violoncello and piano launches the Live at Lunch performances (ROH, 14/01/22)

The Russian cellist Liubov Ulybysheva and the British pìanist Daniel Grimwood delighted us with a beautiful Live at Lunch concert for violoncello and piano on Friday, the 14.01.2022 at Linbury Foyer of the Royal Opera House.

In spite of an ongoing threat of the pandemic, many people came to this first Live at Lunch performance (people were basically flooding in during the whole performance), fulfilling the whole foyer. The concert was introduced by Liubov Ulybysheva as a "Little European musical walk" , a shorter version of her larger concert repertory of European composers. She and Daniel started with two short pieces by the French composer Camille Saint Saëns, who (as Liubov Ulybysheva remarked) was a 'master of miniatures'. They followed with two pieces from the English composer Frank Bridge (the private teacher of Benjamin Britten). The 'masterpiece' of the performance was the Cello sonata from the Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans. Although not very well know (Bosmans has only recently been re-introduced into the repertory), this piece was "big" (as Liubov Ulybysheva stated). And it certainly was - it was a passionate, romantic, impressive, beautiful and full-sound sonata, which left us with ours ears and eyes wide opened and with the eagerness to discover more about this Dutch composer.

The concert finished with two pieces from the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich : Adagio and Springtime waltz. The Linbury foyer provides a very nice acoustics for these concerts were the sound can fill the whole piece.