JAN HUGO (PIANO)

Friends of Music solo recital a spectacular success (Review by Michael Green)

Jan Hugo is an 18-year-old pianist who was born in Bloemfontein and is now living and studying in Modena, Italy. This solo recital for the Friends of Music, at the Durban Jewish Centre, was a spectacular success.

From the first notes of the Scarlatti sonata (K. 212) with which he opened it was clear that he has a keyboard technique of a superior order. What emerged further, as the programme progressed, was a musical insight astonishingly mature in one so young. Jan Hugo is a tall, slender young man, poised and unaffected at the keyboard. His choice of programme, a list of consistently fine works that are not played too often, indicated taste and judgment as well as high skills.

The Scarlatti he chose was one of the lesser-known of the roughly 550 sonatas written by this eighteenth century master and it was typically bold and advanced for its time. Beethoven’s Les Adieux sonata Op. 81a, followed, giving the performer the opportunity to show his grasp of the form of a large work. I thought his best playing was in the beautiful Adagio, in which he conveyed just the right degree of restrained melancholy.

Three pieces from Ravel’s Miroirs suite gave the young virtuoso the opportunity to show his remarkable abilities, especially in the forbiddingly difficult Alborada del gracioso, a sort of Spanish rhapsody a la Ravel. The programme notes, which seemed to have been extracted from the Internet, were unusually informative, and the Ravel entry referred to a cascade of notes being played at more than 20 consecutive notes per second. Can this be true? I doubt it. Anyway, Jan Hugo’s presentation was breathtakingly fast and brilliant.

Two of Liszt’s Petrarch sonnets gave more pleasure to the listeners. These pieces were written in the 1830’s when Liszt was travelling in Switzerland and Italy with his mistress, fathering three illegitimate children in the process. Typically, he called them Années de Pelerinage, Years of Pilgrimage. As a whole they are among his best piano works, and the Petrarch sonnets are particularly beautiful. A slight pity that the pianist omitted the third, the best of the three. But the two he did play provided some of the best moments of the evening.

Cesar Franck’s imposing Prelude, Chorale and Fugue brought a taxing programme to an end. Jan Hugo played Franck’s rather dense score with clarity and resonance and brought to the whole work a pianistic brilliance not often associated with Franck’s music.
The performer entirely deserved the ovation he was given at the end by a delighted audience.

The evening’s Prelude Performer, funded by the National Lottery Trust Fund, was Brett Alborough, a third-year music student at UKZN. He plays the clarinet, recorder, piano and saxophone. On this occasion he played the recorder in a sonata by Francesco Barsanti, an Italian who spend most of his life (18th century) in Britain, and the well-known Czardas written about a hundred years ago by another Italian, Vittorio Monte. He displayed a pure tone and deft fingerwork, and he was sympathetically accompanied at the piano by Jacques Heyns. - Michael Green