Imogen Cooper's Schubert Impromptus in Cambridge

Last Friday, 23 October, Trinity College Chapel hosted one of the more talked-about evenings of the Cambridge Music Festival autumn series. Pianist Imogen Cooper played Schubert's Four Impromptus, starting at 7:30 PM. The concert was sold out, although some returns were released on the door from 6:45 PM for anyone still hoping to get in.

The evening was split into two sets. The first was the Four Impromptus D899, Op. 90, which lasts around half an hour. The second was the Four Impromptus D935, Op. 142, which takes about forty minutes. Cooper then closed with an encore, the Allegretto in C minor, one of the last pieces Schubert wrote. Tickets had been priced at £5 for under-18s, £10 for students, £20, £35 and £48, so the hall had seats across a wide range of budgets.

For anyone less familiar with Cooper, she was born in North London in 1949 and moved to Paris at twelve to study at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique, where she won a Premier Prix in 1967. Over the decades she has become particularly associated with Schubert, Schumann and Mozart, and she was made a Dame in the 2021 Birthday Honours for services to music. In 2019 she received the Queen's Medal for Music, the first pianist to be given that honour. Her recordings include several volumes of Schubert Live, as well as song cycles with baritone Wolfgang Holzmair.

The concert also carried a certain weight for other reasons. In January this year, Cooper announced that she would retire from public performance in early 2027, after a farewell tour of around thirteen months across Europe. According to the Cambridge Independent, John Gilroy's review of the Cambridge concert singled out the virtuosic final stretch of the programme and described the performance as spellbinding, on a piano he praised for its craftsmanship. Sir Simon Rattle, who has worked with her over many years, has described her as one of the greatest musicians England has produced, and has pointed to the reflective, poetic side of her playing that he hears in her Mozart, Schumann and Schubert.

The autumn series continues at Trinity College Chapel on Friday 20 November, when Marc-André Hamelin performs a programme that includes Chopin, Debussy, Enescu, Weinberg and Earl Wild's Gershwin studies. The festival's other concerts in Cambridge this season are spread across King's College Chapel, West Road Concert Hall and Trinity College Chapel, so regular concertgoers have a good range of venues to choose from over the coming weeks.