Yui Higashijima won the third Alicante Piano Competition “Gonzalo Soriano” in 2025. As part of her prize, she was invited to play a concerto with the Elche Symphony Orchestra. The Schumann Piano Concerto was chosen, and last night she played the concerto with the orchestra in one of three concerts in the cycle. This particular concert took place in the ADDA auditorium in Alicante, and there will be another performance in Torrevieja tonight.
As one of the organisers of the competition in Alicante, I would be expected to give a positive review of the concert and the playing of the soloist. I will not disappoint. But I will go considerably further than that.
I have heard the Schumann Piano Concerto many times in concert and literally hundreds of times in broadcasts and recordings. As anyone who reads my reviews regularly will already know, I maintain that I have a musical blind spot when it comes to Robert Schumann. I often find his music rather empty, with emotion worn on the sleeve of his frockcoat to make up for the absence of the real thing. Well, I realized last night that, in order to understand this music, I needed someone who could communicate the musical experience with both confidence and vision.
The first thing to note is the tempo marking on the first movement. It is “alegro affettuoso”. Now, in previous hearings of the work, I was never musically conscious of the intellectual conflict that Schumann wanted to describe. The conflict is between a youthful vigorous figure and more contemplative character who is conscious of humanity’s darker side. Whether on previous occasions this conflict has been lacking in the interpretations I have heard or whether I missed it in my eagerness to pre-judge the composer, I have no idea.
But last night in the hands of Yui Higashijima, and under the expert and committed direction of Achim Holub, the musical conflict took centre stage. Soloist and conductor were not afraid to vary the tempi to stress the dialogue which leads to conflicting arguments. Now this sounds simple, but in performance it requires discussion, rehearsal and execution. Anyone who has performed in public will know that “getting it done” can be paramount. To exert control and interpretation to this level of performance is a real achievement and both soloist and conductor were of the same mind. Together, they opened the ears of this particular listener, who came away from the performance, as if hearing the work for the first time. Perhaps I had heard it for the first time, all the previous occasions, being “hearings”, not “listenings”.
Yui Higashijima’s performance of the piece was simply outstanding. She brought meaning and shaped to every phrase of the score. Achim Holub’s conducting was expert. He demanded a lot of the Elche Orchestra and the players responded with perfection. I will simply never listen to the concerto again, or indeed, Robert Schumann’s music in general, without having this performance in mind as a new benchmark.
Yui Higashijima followed with an encore of one of Mozart’s well-known rondos, the one in D major K485. It was interesting to hear how she played this familiar music. She managed to emphasize the surprises without being without losing the overall playfulness of Mozart’s music. Perhaps Yui Higashijima worked magic with Mozart as well!
The concert was subtitled “Portraits of Romanticism”,
and the phrase was important. Having heard Schumann’s mid-century version, we
then heard the Elche Orchestra under Achim Holub perform the Symphony No. 4 of
Johannes Brahms from 1885. By the fourth symphony, it seemed that Brahms had
relaxed a little. Again, the music was given space to express itself and it did
so with expert guidance and playing. When last year the same orchestra also
played the Brahms Symphony No. 4 in a concert, I wrote that there were some
difficulties with the experience. The first movement on that occasion lacked
shape. Not so on this occasion, when clearly the direction of Achim Holub made
a real difference that reshaped the experience. Last year, the work was listed
as lasting 42 minutes and this year it was 45. The three minutes extra were
probably of the result of Achim Holub’s choice of tempi. Clearly an expert in
the performance of Brahms symphonies, he conducted from memory and successfully
transmitted his personal feelings for the music to the orchestral playing,
which was nothing less than superb.
