Clare Hammond (piano). Lakeside, Nottingham, 10 April 2025, 5✩✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff.

Photo Credit: Lakeside.

Clare Hammond (piano). Lakeside, Nottingham, 10 April 2025,

5✩✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff. 

“Clare Hammond in a recital of intimacy, wit and brilliance.” 

Clare Hammond’s Nottingham recitals are always keenly anticipated, not only because she grew up in the city but also because her programmes are always so imaginatively planned and executed.  On Thursday the music was all French – not just by the usual suspects but featuring rarities by neglected women composers too. 

She opened with three portraits by Mélanie Bonis of legendary women: Desdemona, Phoebe and Mélisande, music of great tenderness and jewel-like clarity, the subtle harmonies suggesting figures in a dream.   

The music of Germaine Tailleferre is better known, although not as much as it should be.  Hers is music of graceful individuality, her taste for the neo-classical evident in the Partita which Clare played, its movements harking back to the world of Bach but steeped in the rhythms and harmonies of the 20th century. 

At the recital’s heart was rather more familiar music.  Clare is the ideal exponent of Ravel’s piano music.  Its complexities require a formidable technique – and Clare certainly has that.  In fact, it was a joy to see her fingers at work in pieces which require some extraordinary digital gymnastics.  The music is seductively sensuous, sometimes brilliant, sometimes darkly menacing, even managing to be both at once.  It is also scrupulously and masterfully crafted, requiring playing of the utmost precision to achieve the crystalline transparency through which his ideas shine.   

This was everywhere apparent in his exquisite Sonatine, which Clare played with limpid grace, and even more in the suite entitled Le Tombeau de Couperin.  Written just after the end of World War 1, each of its six movements is dedicated to a comrade who had fallen in battle.  It’s not gloomy music, however, Ravel maintaining that the dead are sad enough without his music adding to their woes.  In Clare’s hands the opening Prélude bubbled blissfully along, the snappy rhythms of the Forlane suggested a cheerful insouciance, the Minuet was graceful and tender, the Rigaudon was the most joyful of dances – and the final Toccata was a dazzling display of pianistic brilliance.  More than anything, Clare’s playing explored the tension between the suite’s surface charm and its subtly darker undercurrents. 

She brought the same sharp insight to her playing of Debussy.  It’s easy to see why he objected to being called an impressionist composer.  Whereas the artists achieved their effects through broad strokes quickly applied, Debussy’s music suggests spontaneity through the most painstaking precision.  It is wonderfully evocative of visual phenomena, of landscapes, clouds, the sea, portraying people and nature in an ambiguous yet immediate reality.   

 Clare stated that she thought the first of Debussy’s Images (‘Reflets dans l’Eau’) is the nearest music gets to capturing the colours, textures and atmosphere of Monet’s famous water lilies canvases.  Her delicate, shimmering performance was entirely convincing.  The same can be said of the four Préludes she performed, each one  imbued with luminous precision.  Her selection covered a wide range of inspiration, from  the bells, dance and song of  ‘Les Collines d’Anacapri’ to the antics of an American clown in ‘General Lavine – eccentric’.   

Clare used her musical intelligence to bring into vivid focus the full range of Debussy’s intimacy, wit, brilliance, mystery and unfailing originality.  Just as she had done with the rest of her programme, which also featured some richly mysterious Fauré and the delightful piece of Dutilleux which followed as encore. 

Clare Hammond, piano.