Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House
October 22, 2018

“First, let’s talk about applause…”

The legendary Sir András Schiff began his Sydney recital with a few words about the music. Or perhaps I should say, about the spaces between the music. For while he did not order the 2500-strong crowd filling the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall to sit on their hands after Schumann’s ‘Ghost Variations’, he made it very clear that, for him, an appropriate response to this confessional palimpsest exhumed from the ragged depths of a broken mind would be silence.

We did not need telling twice. We probably didn’t need telling once. As he sat, hands poised above the keyboard, the strange tangle of notes of Schumann’s final work decaying around him, we sat, holding our collective breaths, any impulse to clap frozen by the overwhelming sense of deep contemplation, of absolute concentration.

Schiff performs from memory. That’s more than an hour of repertoire, played with only a short pause between each movement. Taking into account both halves of the concert, and his concert two days earlier in Melbourne, which had no overlaps with the Sydney program, that’s more than four hours of repertoire...