The musical event of the year: Wigmore Hall BBC Radio 3 Special Broadcasts reviewed

Remember when 2020 was going to be Beethoven year? There were going to be cycles and festivals, recordings and reappraisals; and if you weren’t actively promoting old Ludwig Van there was money to be made whinging about overkill. So was Stephen Hough’s decision to end his Wigmore Hall recital last Monday with Schumann’s Fantasie in C — a work conceived at least partly in homage to Beethoven, which opens with a fragmented musical landscape that Schumann at one point called ‘Ruins’ — a conscious reflection of the musical world’s changed circumstances? Or would that be reading too much into a situation in which a once-routine lunchtime concert suddenly feels like the musical event of the year?

I don’t think that’s overstating it — at least not if Twitter is any indication. Listeners were in tears; they’d had their radios on while making lunch, and found themselves transfixed. Comparisons with Myra Hess’s wartime concerts at the National Gallery did not seem absurd, once you discounted the possibility of aerial bombardment, and similar enthusiasm greeted the week’s remaining lunchtime concerts — all, likewise, broadcast live from the Wigmore Hall.