FOM: TRIO HEMANAY

Friends of Music presents pleasurable concert. (Review by Michael Green)

This Johannesburg-based trio consists of Malcolm Nay (piano), Helen Vosloo (flute) and Marian Lewin (cello), an unusual combination of instruments. The name of the group is (I assume) a composite word made up of He(len), Ma(rian) and Nay (Malcolm).

They have played before for the Friends of Music, and for this recital in the Durban Jewish Centre they chose a distinctly unusual programme. You have to be rather brave, I think, to devote an entire programme, with one exception, to contemporary composers, and I suspect that the relatively small size of the audience reflected a certain wariness about the music being played.

Be that as it may, the works performed gave much pleasure to the listeners, none more so than the sole exception to the modern pattern, a 1790 Trio in D major by Haydn. The music was typical of this master: melodious, good-humoured, skilfully scored, terse and to the point. The players excelled, with the balance and rapport one would expect from a team who have been playing together for 13 years, and Malcolm Nay was in particularly good form at the piano. Most enjoyable, and warmly applauded.

Haydn died in 1809, aged 77. The only other really familiar name on the programme was Astor Piazzolla, the Argentine king of the tango, who died in 1992, aged 71. He was represented, predictably enough, by some catchy tango music.

The English composer John Rutter (born 1945) is well-known in Britain and the United States because he has written a good deal of choral music, hymns and carols. He was represented here by his Suite Antique, originally scored for flute, harpsichord and strings but arranged for cello, flute and piano by Nicholas Abbott, a young Cape Town cellist who died last year in a mountain accident, and by the South African composer Allan Stephenson.

The French composer Jean-Michel Damase (born 1928) writes rather whimsical and witty music, and his Sonate en Concert is a delightful sequence of widely varied short pieces, many of them with a slightly antique flavour; the composer has a liking for old baroque forms such as the rigaudon and the gigue. The audience found this music, written in 1952, very appealing, and it was indeed performed with skill and flair. Two South African composers completed the programme: Wessel van Rensburg (born 1964), with a work called No Words, based on African jazz; and Hendrik Hofmeyr (born 1957), with two contrasting tangos.

The printed programme was rather cryptic, and announcements from the stage didn’t help much. A partly inaudible announcement by a performer is not really a substitute for a good programme note.


The prelude performers of the evening, funded by the National Lottery, were Neliswa Katamzi and Ntokozo Mhlongo, students at the opera school of the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Accompanied by Dana Hadjiev at the piano, they sang some popular songs, of which O mio babbino caro, from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, arranged here for two sopranos, was the best-known and the best-performed. The singers showed great promise. - Michael Green