FRIENDS OF MUSIC: AVIGAIL & JACQUELINE

Avigail Bushakevitz (violin) and Jacqueline Wedderburn-Maxwell (violin). (Review by Michael Green)

Youth and beauty and lovely music were the themes of this outstanding concert given for the Friends of Music at the Durban Jewish Centre.

The two violinists and two pianists were all young people and all accomplished artists, and they chose a programme of high-quality music.

At the Friends of Music we have seen and heard Avigail Bushakevitz over the years. She was born in Israel, grew up at George in the south-western Cape and is now, at the age of 21, a third-year-student at the Juilliard School in New York. She is no longer an interesting and promising child musician. She is a mature and accomplished artist, a graceful young woman who is as easy on the eye as she is on the ear.

Partnered at the piano by her brother Ammiel Bushakevitz, who is much the same age, she gave an excellent performance of Beethoven’s first Violin Sonata, Op. 12, No. 1. I deliberately use the word “partnered” rather than “accompanied” because the two instruments play a virtually equal role in the Beethoven sonatas. The early sonatas are wonderful works, tuneful, stylish, often brilliant, and this one in D major gave both players the opportunity to shine. This they did, with Avigail confident and poised and displaying an admirably full tone.

Both players showed a good judgment of dynamics and contrast, especially in the second movement, a short set of variations with exquisite tonal balance.

They followed with Ernest Chausson’s Poeme for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 25, written in1896. I am never very happy when orchestral scores are transposed for the piano, but Ammiel handled his part very well, with the right degrees of emphasis and restraint. The violin part is difficult, with long ruminative solo passages and plenty of double stopping and other embellishments. Avigail played it all with power and eloquence. A memorable account of a romantic late nineteenth century work that one does not hear very often.

After the interval the Durban violinist Jacqueline Wedderburn-Maxwell took the stage, with Liezl-Maret Jacobs, head of the piano department at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Jacqueline is 16 years old, Liezl-Maret older but still a young person. And both are very good-looking and poised musicians.

Like Avigail Bushakevitz, Jacqueline has played many times in Durban and we have watched her development with interest. Avigail is five years older, and I do not wish to compare the two as violinists. Suffice it to say that Jacqueline is now a highly accomplished performer (she will shortly be studying in London at the Guildhall School of Music) and she showed impressive technique and interpretative insight in three widely varied items.

She opened with the first two movements of Schubert’s Grand Duo Sonata in A major, a typically melodious and inventive work by this great composer, and then demonstrated her technical prowess in Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy, a showpiece based on melodies from Bizet’s opera.

Of greater musical substance were the third and fourth movements from the Sonata in A major by the Belgian/French composer Cesar Franck. Written in 1886, this is Franck’s best work, and it was very well played, with Liezl-Maret Jacobs in splendid form at the keyboard.

Finally the violinists joined forces in a Bach concerto.

Both these distinguished and home-bred young artists will now spend some years studying and working abroad. Will they return to South Africa to pursue their careers here? We shall see.

The Prelude Performers of the evening, funded by the National Lottery, were a group of six brass players and two drummers from an organisation called the Field Band Foundation. They went to work with gusto and were particularly good in what seemed to be an item of township jazz. - Michael Green