FIRST NIGHT | CLASSICAL

Laura van der Heijden review — the sound of cello, neurosis and nuclear war

Wigmore Hall, W1
Laura van der Heijden and her pianist partner, Tom Poster, at Wigmore Hall
Laura van der Heijden and her pianist partner, Tom Poster, at Wigmore Hall

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★★★★☆
There’s a degree of jumping on the bandwagon about the way that 20th-century black American composers such as Florence Price and George Walker have been so swiftly elevated from invisibility into being as regularly featured in British concert halls as, say, Aaron Copland.

Yet when I hear a work such as Walker’s Sonata for Cello and Piano, I cannot help feeling that such magnificent music can have been held back only by the prejudice of previous generations. And, perhaps, by being very difficult to play. Laura van der Heijden and her pianist partner, Tom Poster, made an excellent case for it here. Terse, dark, dissonant and metrically restless, it’s a typically mid-20th-century document — redolent, to my ears, of nuclear anxiety and the souring