Two Schubert sonatas were the main works framing Mishka Rushdie Momen’s programme in the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama’s Steinway series. Given that both were in the minor mode – the A minor, D784 and the C minor, D958 – together they constituted quite a serious, heavyweight affair for a Sunday morning recital.
A pianist of graceful poise and sensitivity, Momen has a highly fluent technique that allowed everything to carry well in this acoustic. And, despite seeming a slight slip of a thing, to use an old-fashioned phrase, in these sonatas she showed that she could unleash considerable power in Schubert’s outbursts of high-volume dramatic tension, sometimes shocking in their immediacy. At the other extreme, her pianissimo was often pianississimo, so that lyrical lines, rather than quietly singing out, sounded understated and as a result curiously underwhelming. It was in the mercurial finale of the A minor sonata and the lilting, dance-like F major theme with its chromatic edge, poignant and piquant at every appearance, that Momen captured most expressively the happy/sad ambivalence of this composer’s musical makeup.
That same tendency to play on vast dynamic contrasts was present in the C minor sonata too, the first of Schubert’s final three almost symphonic sonatas in which trauma and foreboding coexist with the consoling beauty of music. Again, it was the Allegro finale – febrile, fast and furious – that communicated best.
Three pieces from Janáček’s On an Overgrown Path, No 1 Naše večery (Our Evenings), No 9 V pláči (In Tears) and No 10, Sýček neodletěl! (The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away!) formed a neat tripartite sequence. In these Moravian-inflected melodies, Momen negotiated the balance of serenity and volatility in a way which resonated with Schubert.
Momen has written about her affinity for the keyboard music of William Byrd and this was manifest in her playing of his Prelude and Fantasia in A minor, MB 12 and 13. Here was fine rhythmic clarity and conviction, but with an element of playful fantasy too. It felt refreshing for being a foil for the big sonatas and, heard in this context was also, for many, an illuminating introduction to the Renaissance master.
• In recital at Wesley Centre, Harrogate, 2 June ; at Wigmore Hall, London, 8 June
