The Platform Series
From solo performances to University music groups, baroque to contemporary, we are pleased to continue our platform for the community at the Department of Music to share their world-class talents.
For this edition of The Platform, we welcome doctoral student and pianist, April Wu, for this late-afternoon performance of C P E Bach, Schubert, Chopin and Scriabin.
About the programme
In this recital, musicologist and pianist April Wu traces a line of restlessness through two centuries of keyboard writing. The programme opens, in trance-like improvisation, with C P E Bach’s Fantasia in F# minor (1787). Its sudden switches in harmony, texture, and timbre enact sound’s capacity to mutate and disorient, yet without relinquishing a sense of order. Schubert’s Sonata in A minor, D 784 (1823), written in the shadow of the composer’s illness, presages the haunting soundworld of his last three sonatas. Bells permeate the sparse texture of the opening Allegro: stern amidst a funeral procession, briefly soothing in a smaller, resonant interior. The Andante opens with the calmest arch-shaped melody, whose unfolding is disrupted by menacing ppp interjections. The melody then migrates to the tenor voice, enveloped in a shimmering string quartet texture. The closing Allegro vivace pulses with nervous energy, with its relentless triplet ascents and ferocious arpeggios, yielding temporarily, in characteristic Schubertian fashion, to glowing, lyrical interludes.
After the interval, Chopin’s Nocturne in F# minor, Op 48 No 2 (1841) descends into rumination. The melodic line is pure bel canto, at once fragile and inexhaustible. A youthful Scriabin, still Romantic in idiom but already reaching toward something more volatile, closes the programme that moves from withdrawal to ignition. The first of his Two Impromptus, Op 12 (1895) colours the dreamscape in more esoteric light; the second offers an ardent singing line that, in the final page, burns through its own material.
Booking is essential.
Our Platform Series is now pay-what-you-can for general admission. These events remain FREE for Royal Holloway students, Royal Holloway staff and children under the age of 16. Season tickets apply to this event.
