Mitsuko Uchida’s divine Beethoven

Last October I was lucky to be within the intimacy of London’s Wigmore Hall to witness Mitsuko Uchida perform Beethoven’s three final piano sonatas, Ops 109-111. Physically ethereal, Uchida, now in her late seventies, transmitted a similar delicacy to her instrument, harnessed with a precision apparent especially in the ‘Adagio ma non troppo’ of 110, which drifts into the divine mathematics of the work’s closing fugue. Recorded beautifully in that same month, the great Japanese virtuoso now offers a chance for many more to hear her rendering of the same demanding programme performed in Tokyo’s Suntory Hall. These are among the greatest, most innovative pieces of music ever written – listen to the syncopated rhythms of the second movement of the final sonata, which anticipate jazz – and there can never be a definitive performance. It is hard, however, to imagine a more satisfying one than this.

Touki Bouki: masterpiece of African cinema

Raw, visceral and drenched in colour, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1973 film Touki Bouki (‘The Journey of the Hyena’, from the Wolof) is a masterpiece of African cinema, though its greatness was only truly recognised following Martin Scorsese’s restoration of it in 2008. Mory, a cattle-herder, and Anta, a student at Dakar University, disaffected by post-independence Africa, hatch a plot to escape to Europe. Only one of them succeeds, but not before the youthful couple, who owe much to the legend of Bonnie and Clyde and the romantic pairings of the French New Wave, tear around on a moped plotting and causing frenetic havoc to the backdrop of a riveting soundtrack.

On the Eastern Front

It remains bewildering that so many current travails are rooted in the disaster of the First World War. Nick Lloyd’s masterly The Eastern Front: A History of the First World War takes us away from the understandable preponderance of interest in the trench warfare of the West (though he has written brilliantly on that, too) to the vast landscape between Germany and Russia, including the Balkans, the font of the conflict. There, war was more reminiscent of past struggles of pitched battles and Cannae-like pincer movements, but intensified by technolrogy. Great empires fell, enduring hatreds were stoked, and the world was changed irrevocably. Lloyd is now turning his attentions to the Great War in the Middle East. His insights and tragically gripping narratives are awaited with eager anticipation.