EIF Review: Steven Osborne

Piano legend and festival favourite Alfred Brendel died in June of last year, too late for a tribute to be included in the 2025 festival programme. However, this year’s festival more than made up for that omission with three recitals by leading pianists in his memory. So writes Lindsay McMurdo for the QR.co.uk…

The first of these, performed by Edinburgh resident and fellow festival favourite Steven Osborne to a packed lunchtime crowd at the Queen’s Hall, focused squarely on Brendel’s beloved Schubert, punctuated with miniatures by Scottish composers Judith Weir and Sir James MacMillan.

Osborne introduced the programme with a warm tribute to his idol and mentor, remarking on Brendel’s aversion to anything too showy or extraneous. The playing that followed was exactly in that spirit, though never lacking deeply felt emotion and depth.

Schubert’s First-Half Masterpieces: Precision and Lightness

Each half of this carefully-structured programme started with shorter pieces followed by one of Schubert’s late piano masterpieces. The opening Allegretto in C minor immediately foregrounded Osborne’s wonderfully limpid singing tone, which was displayed throughout all the recital’s quieter passages. The beguiling and deceptive simplicity of this kind of playing is often underestimated by today’s pianists, but Osborne is really a master.

Judith Weir’s spiky, angular miniature Fragile provided contrast and then Schubert’s Allegretto in C major a different kind of contrast again, all playful and sparkling with much deft fingerwork.

Schubert’s Four Impromptus concluded the first half energetically. These pieces depend on the performer’s ability to turn on a sixpence from dark to light and back again without losing their forward momentum, a challenge to which Osborne rose magnificently. The constantly cascading triplets of the third impromptu, delivered as if lighter than air, were a particular highlight.

Culminating in Schubert’s Big Beast: The Sonata in C Minor

After the break, four shorter pieces, including Osborne’s own arrangement of Schubert’s Liebesbotschaft and a lovely rendition of Am Meer – that beautiful tone again to the fore – set the scene for the culminating Sonata in C minor.

“Osborne introduced the programme with a warm tribute to his idol and mentor, remarking on Brendel’s aversion to anything too showy or extraneous. The playing that followed was exactly in that spirit, though never lacking deeply felt emotion and depth.”

This very late work is one of the big beasts of the classical piano repertoire, thirty minutes of constantly shifting mood and pace, from the turbulence of the first movement through the elegant simplicity of the second, the dramatic stop/start variations of the third and the thundering final resolution of the fourth.

Osborne negotiated this twisting labyrinth of sound with consummate skill throughout, unleashing a real driving energy, almost as thrilling to watch as to hear. He was rewarded with rapturous applause, richly deserved. The whole recital was a terrific, sustained feat of first-class musicianship, of which Maestro Brendel would surely have very much approved.