November 2025

Geoff Brown in «The Times» (2.11.2025) about Thomas Larcher’s Portrait day at Wigmore Hall

Thomas Larcher review — five stars for a perfect showcase

The spotlight was on Wigmore Hall’s composer in residence as his delightful new string quartet was given its UK premiere in a special focus day

It was instructive to observe Thomas Larcher during the UK premiere of his new string quartet at the start of Wigmore Hall’s Composer in Residence Focus Day. Wishing to concentrate entirely on his music, he bent his head downwards, sometimes cradling his crown with his right hand. It wasn’t a pose any others adopted as we listened and looked, engrossed and excited by the magic carpets of sound laid out before us by the Austrian composer who deconstructs music’s elements only to crosshatch the art form’s present and future with its illustrious past.

By blocking out Quatuor Diotima and the other excellent musicians, Larcher missed some ancillary pleasures. There was the furious bowing of the violinist Benjamin Baker and the cellist Maciej Kulakowski, seemingly racing to discover who could play the fastest, and the serpentine wiggles of the ace clarinettist Matthew Hunt, executing one of Larcher’s many sliding descents between pitches. The one obvious drawback to open-eyed listening was seeing Benjamin Frith pausing so often to «prepare» his piano’s innards, interrupting the momentum of the piano trio «Kraken», an early example of Larcher’s fondness for juxtaposing, layering and raiding past musical styles.

The new string quartet, his fifth, subtitled «out of the bluest blue», was a particular delight. Opulent late-19th century harmonies danced before us, metamorphosed into something grittier, moved on to scurrying and slithering before reaching one of those winking endings with an upward glide from the cello’s ocean floor. Quatuor Diotima’s mettle was equally obvious in their succulent account of the quartet by Ravel, a most well-chosen companion. The afternoon concert’s highlight was a revised version of «A Padmore Cycle», written originally for the tenor Mark Padmore but here featuring Ilker Arcayurek, utterly at home enunciating its gnomic poems of alpine life, so atmospherically set.

The evening concert offered something special too: the pianist Paul Lewis, famous as an early 19th-century specialist but armed with a recent and epic Larcher sonata commissioned especially for him. Playful and grandiose by turns (possibly too many turns), Larcher’s creation enormously gained from Lewis’s thunderous power and poetic finesse. What fun, too, to see Lewis and Larcher side by side, closing the concert with flair and love, and Schubert’s F minor «Fantasie». The end of a perfect day.
★★★★★

https://www.thetimes.com/culture/classical-opera/article/thomas-larcher-review-five-stars-for-a-perfect-showcase-xgkxm7w38