KZNPO CONCERT: MARCH 18 2010

Omri Hadari obtains first-rate results from KZNPO players, as always. (Review by Michael Green)

Two Russian compositions, not dissimilar in mood but dissimilar in most other respects, featured in this final programme of the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra’s summer season.

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, the Pathetique, was first performed in 1893, only nine days before the composer died after drinking cholera-infected water, an act which many historians have seen as suicidal. The symphony is familiar to almost all concertgoers, but its power and passion have given it an irresistible appeal over the years.

Nikolai Miaskovsky’s Cello Concerto in C minor, the other major work of the orchestra’s programme, was written in 1944, when Russia (and much of the rest of the world) was still at war. Miaskovsky (1881-1950) is an important and prolific composer of the Soviet era in Russia, a period which (unlike some others) he survived through a general compliance with the authorities. His concerto, like Tchaikovsky’s symphony, is mainly sorrowful, but the reasons are social rather than personal.

Incidentally, the programme note said that Miaskovsky’s music, “inexplicably, is not performed as often as that of Prokofiev and Shostakovich”. It is entirely explicable; his music is not as good as theirs.

Be that as it may, the cello concerto is an interesting and impressive work and this was its first performance in South Africa, with the solo part played by Boris Kerimov, the orchestra’s excellent principal cellist. With the co-operative help of the visiting Israeli conductor Omri Hadari, he gave a thoughtful and convincing interpretation of this unfamiliar music, displaying expressive phrasing and admirable purity of tone in the meditative passages.

The cellist suffered an embarrassing memory lapse in the first movement. After a lengthy and unscheduled silence he left his chair, briefly looked at the conductor’s score, and then returned and resumed playing. These things can happen, and the audience gave him warm and prolonged applause at the end, in sympathy as well as appreciation, I think.

After 23 years of visiting Durban, Omri Hadari is well-known to the orchestra and to audiences. He is a fairly conservative type of conductor, not too flamboyant, but he obtains first-rate results from the players, as was evident in this concert (which opened with Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin Polonaise).

The audience was substantially smaller than the previous week’s. Whatever the merits of Miaskovsky may be, he doesn’t have the pulling power of Rachmaninov and Sibelius, the composers on the earlier programme. - Michael Green