Reviews

The curtains are open and the stage, lit and ready, containing just a solitary black piano stool. An oddity in any other situation. Apiece of furniture left behind? Forlorn-looking? Or dignified? Is a piano about to join it?

Or have we come on the wrong day? Not a concert at all but More

Performing the Bach Cello Suites is one of the most demanding things a cellist can do. The single stool on an otherwise empty stage looks more like the executioner’s block More

A lovely brisk day, sunlight filling ACCA’s café, an engaging brief talk by Jessie Grimes: everything augured well for this concert by the Jacquin Trio. Yet I found myself slightly thrown for a moment or two. It was partly that Schumann opens his Märchenerzählungen with quirky little More

Enlightenment from inside a darkened room. It was given by Johannes Marmen to a large proportion of the Coffee Concerts audience, of whom 205 turned out early on Sunday to hear his young group make their debut in the series.

Such a high More

What joy to be restarting another coffee concert series, on an unusually warm October morning with golden leaves falling in bright sunshine. The Marmen Quartet is new to us, having formed as recently as 2013 at the Royal College of Music. They gave an extraordinary More

Watching four different bodies combine on stage is one of the fascinations of seeing small-scale ensembles perform in chamber music concerts. We can’t know freely their actual personalities but we can search for clues in how they perform. Our eyes are drawn in all directions.

Here was another example in the frequent flow of Coffee Concert debut-making groups already operating at high level. This time, Quatuor Arod from Paris – intriguingly More