Reviews
Lugano Festival Reviews
A BREATH OF AIR FOR EUROPE
“In between the two works of Respighi’s The Fountains of Rome and Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony, the main piece was the Grieg piano concerto in which the young English soloist, Grace Francis, played with agility, choosing a dimension of delicate technique rather than favouring a romantic approach.
The audience’s long and enthusiastic applause showed its appreciation to all the talent of the EUYO and their celebrated conductor.”
- Gasperi Giuliano
- Corriere del Ticino
The Young Learn through the Means of their Teachers
“In Lugano, the inaugural concert last night with the European Youth Orchestra, conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy, gave a possible key to the question of why he gives preferential support to this event. The famous conductor escorted and introduced a young musician.
It happened last night when the pianist Grace Francis, who, so far, is inexplicably still on the fringe of the international concert circuit.
A discovery, then, that Ashkenazy, the most famous among living pianists, himself wanted to have her in the EUYO tour.”
- Zeno Gabaglio
A Remarkable Debut CD
“Grace Francis’s recital at Wigmore Hall last month is closely followed by this equally remarkable debut disc. She has a prodigious technique, so the bravura demands of Brahms’s Paganini Variations and Liszt’s Tarantella hold no terrors for her, and she makes Liszt’s intricate filigree writing a thing of enchantment. She revels, too, in the rhythmic energy of the Brahms C major sonata, but sounds a deep, glowing note in its slow-movement variations. This early opus, written when the composer was barely 20, is revealed as a work of extraordinary confidence and structural strength and subtlety. Schumann, when Brahms played it to him, wrote in his diary: “a genius”. It’s tempting to say the same of Francis. She’s certainly a pianist to watch.”
- David Cairns, Sunday Times 13 December 2009
Chichester Festival Review
Grace Francis At Chichester Cathedral
“How refreshing, in an image-obsessed age, to see an apparently shy, studious young woman approach the piano and then hold an audience enthralled.
Grace Francis built her Chichester Festivities programme on contrasts, in the third sonata by Brahms and between works by Rachmaninov and Liszt.
In Liszt it was a mixture of the religious (Ave Maria) and the fiendish (Mephisto Waltz No 1). A mixture of the Grace of God and the dare of the Devil, you might say.
Ms Francis had the full measure of the Russian qualities of Rachmaninov, too, but the truest measure of her musicianship and technique came in the Brahms.
Anyone hearing it for the first time and knowing nothing about it would find it impossible to say whether it was from the composer’s fierily youthful years or his final reflective phase. In fact it is early (Opus 5), and the never-flashy British pianist plunged into its big ideas with properly explosive passion without sacrificing quality of sound.
But the sonata’s two slow movements represent the music’s heart, and here Ms Francis was equally successful – catching the rapture of the first and the regret of the second.
Throughout the recital, she showed a fine command of long-breathed melodic lines.”