GRIGORY ALUMYAN & RINKO HAMA

Friends of Music present evening of outstanding music. (Review by Michael Green)

The opening notes for solo cello in Beethoven’s Op. 69 sonata indicated that we were listening to a player of superior quality, and so it proved in this recital for Friends of Music at the Durban Jewish Centre.

Grigory Alumyan is a Russian cellist and he was partnered in this recital by Rinko Hama, a Japanese pianist who has collaborated with him for the past nine years. She was born in Japan but seems to have spent most of the past 20 years in Europe. At the keyboard she matches his skills with the cello.

In Durban they presented a substantial and consistently enjoyable programme, beginning with the main item of the evening, the Beethoven sonata. This magnificent work in A major is the best of Beethoven’s five sonatas for cello and piano, and it brought forth splendid playing from the performers.

Here, as in the other compositions on the programme, the cello and piano are equal partners; the piano part is certainly not an accompaniment. The brief opening phase for the cello was played with great power and resonance, setting the standard for a memorable performance. The cellist’s broad and accurate tone was given to great effect in the short and beautiful Adagio cantabile, and the rapid final movement provided plenty of opportunity for the pianist to show her virtuosity.

They followed with arrangements by Paul Kochonski of Manuel de Falla’s Seven Popular Spanish Songs, playing six of the seven items. The original for soprano and piano is well known and there is a good arrangement for solo piano by Ernesto Halffter, who studied with Falla, but this cello version was new to me. I felt that the cello was perhaps too weighty an instrument for some of these wild and captivating songs, but Grigory Alumyan produced a beautiful singing tone in the melancholy Nana lullaby and in Asturiana.

Incidentally, the programme note said that Asturiana was by far the best known of these songs. I would have thought that the best known was the very lively Seguidilla murciana, the one song omitted in this performance.

Schumann’s rarely played Adagio and Allegro, Op.70, made a good contrast, and the concert ended with Grieg’s sonata for cello and piano in A minor, Op. 36. This is an extended three-movement work running for about 30 minutes. Grieg’s music is sometimes underrated. In fact he was a highly original and gifted composer, and the far-ranging subject matter of this sonata might have come as a surprise to some listeners. The players delivered it with great intensity and skill to complete an evening of outstanding music.

The prelude performer of the evening, funded by the National Lottery, was the soprano Lize Bothma, a 17-year-old pupil at Crawford College North Coast, who, accompanied by Ros Conrad, presented songs by Alessandro Scarlatti, Hugo Wolf and George Gershwin. - Michael Green