KZNPO WINTER SEASON OPENING CONCERT

First of limited season of four concerts featured two gifted young performers. (Review by Michael Green)

A programme of Beethoven and Wagner drew a reasonably large audience to the Durban City Hall for the first concert of the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra’s winter season, a season limited to four concerts because of the looming World Cup events.

Two gifted young performers who are making big names in the world made their first appearances with our orchestra: the British conductor Joseph Wolfe and the Russian pianist Katya Apekisheva.

Joseph Wolfe is the son of the celebrated English conductor Sir Colin Davis. He changed his name because he did not want to be burdened with the mantle of a famous father, and he has done very well indeed on his own merits. He is a vigorous kind of conductor --- once or twice he made little leaps on the podium --- and he appears to have given great care to the detail of the music. Under his direction the orchestra gave fine, full-blooded performances of Wagner’s Meistersinger Prelude and Beethoven’s Symphony No 4 in B flat major. The complex and ingenious counterpoint of the Wagner work was expertly defined, though the brass tended to be too dominant at one point.

Katya Apekisheva was born in Moscow but now spends much of her time in London, where her playing has been widely praised. She is a fairly flamboyant kind of player, but there is no doubting her technical skills and the general musicality of her approach.

Playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor she showed considerable power and great fluency in the big passages, but I was impressed most of all by her delicacy and judgment in the quieter moments, especially the exquisite Largo. I tend to judge pianists not by how well they can play loudly but now well they can play softly, and Katya Apekisheva produced a caressing cantabile that carried to the far reaches of the City Hall.

At the end there was prolonged applause, and she responded with an unusual encore. Instead of the meretricious trivia so often offered as encores she played Brahms’s Intermezzo in A major, Op. 118, No. 2, taken at a very deliberate tempo and played with a gentle tone aptly suited for this tender and slightly melancholy piece. Brahms described his late piano compositions as children of his old age, and this pianist caught the mood exactly. - Michael Green

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