Wigmore Hall / London
9 May 2004

Guy Johnston has already forged a place as one of the country's most promising and distinctive cellist.  It's difficult not to be engaged by his extrovert musical personality, though it can be better suited to some works than others, as his Sunday morning coffee concert at the Wigmore Hall (9 May) confirmed.

Johnston played his ace at the outset with Debussy's Sonata. By turns lyrical and capricious, Johnston captured well the work's rhapsodic nuances as well as projecting a narrative quality. The Brahms's E minor Cello Sonata op.38 and Schumann's Fantasiestücke were both projected with characteristic urgency.

In between these Romantic edifices, Arvo Pärt's Fratres was beautifully spun, and if there was sometimes more of a concern for melodic flow than for nestling the notes within the slowly shifting harmonies, Johnston showed lightness and control, and nerves of steel when it came to stratospheric harmonic playing.

Edward Bhesania