Durban-born pianist presents unusual and attractive programme for Friends of Music. (Review by Michael Green)
A large audience turned up at the Durban Jewish Centre for this piano recital by Durban-born Jonathan Oshry, the home town boy who is now, at the age of 34, a fully fledged virtuoso based in London. They were not disappointed. In an unusual and attractive programme, Jonathan Oshry displayed great skills, combining a formidable keyboard technique with a mature insight into the quality of the music itself.
This was especially apparent in the Schubert Sonata in B flat Major, D 960. This is a long work, about 40 minutes, and it occupied the entire first half of the programme. It is a late composition --- the term “late” is relative, Schubert was only 31 when he died --- and a beautiful one. Jonathan played it with loving care and attention, bringing out all the subtleties in Schubert’s score, with delicate shading and dynamics in the many shifts of harmony and key. Perhaps his finest playing was in the Andante, a melody floating in space.
It was a rewarding experience to listen to this great sonata. The programme note said, correctly, that Schubert’s piano sonatas were long neglected but that the last three are now recognised as masterpieces. I would go further. Schubert wrote about 20 sonatas (some of them unfinished), and at least ten of them are splendid works worthy of performance in the concert hall but, alas, rarely played. Perhaps Jonathan Oshry’s performance of this one will stimulate interest in the others. They are of course available on CDs.
The second half of the programme was devoted to Chopin’s four Scherzi, not often played as a group. These are as taxing as anything in the virtuoso repertory, and Jonathan Oshry took the first in particular at a fast and furious pace (as the composer directed). And he extracted full lyrical value from the slow middle section, a theme which is based on a Polish song and which provides some of the loveliest moments in all of Chopin.
The second scherzo has another beautiful melody, and the third has an almost choral-like subject, with fierce octave passages on either side. The fourth, the least known, is elegant and graceful. Jonathan Oshry captured all these different moods with understanding and with complete technical control.
For an encore he presented another alarmingly difficult piece, Liszt’s Transcendental Etude which is titled Feux follets, Will o’ the Wisp. A wonderful, shimmering demonstration of rapid playing of thirds, fourths, sixths and various other technical problems.
The prelude performer of the evening, funded by the National Lottery, was Keziah Peel, a 16-year-old pupil at Durban Girls’ College, who played the saxophone in a work by, of all composers, J.S. Bach. Johann Sebastian died in 1750 and the saxophone was invented by the Belgian Adolphe Sax in 1842. This was an arrangement of two movements of a Bach sonata for violin (or flute) and piano, and it worked rather well, I thought, with Jacques Heyns at the piano.
Her second item was the first movement of a 1992 “Blues Concerto” by Bill Holcombe, an American composer. The title of this work speaks for itself, and the music proved to be interesting and entertaining. The young saxophonist played it with zest and style. Incidentally, Keziah’s unusual first name comes from the Old Testament, Keziah being one of the daughters of the long-suffering Job. I have this information from the best possible source: her mother. - Michael Green
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