(Pic by Ursula Markus: Swiss violinist Sibylle Tschopp)Highly accomplished soloist, a seasoned and skilful conductor and full strength orchestra in top form. (Review by Michael Green)
A big audience attended this opening concert of the spring season of the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra; there was an unusually long queue at the Durban City Hall waiting to buy on-the-night tickets, which cost substantially less than booked subscribers’ tickets.
All those present were, I think, well pleased with the outcome: a concert which presented a highly accomplished soloist, a seasoned and skilful conductor and the orchestra at full strength, about 70 players, and in top form.
The conductor was the 68-year-old Victor Yampolsky, who grew up in Russia but has lived in the United States for the past 37 years. He has visited Durban several times before and seems to have a particularly good rapport with the orchestra. This, plus his great experience and musical insight, extracts the best results from our players.
The soloist was Sibylle Tschopp, a Swiss violinist, from Zurich. She is in her late thirties, and she has an imposing record as a performer in Europe and America. Clad in a royal blue evening gown, her slender figure was a picture of cool confidence as she played Tchaikovsky’s beautiful and formidably difficult Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35.
This is one of the high points of the entire concerto repertory, and it seems hardly credible now that it was mercilessly attacked after its first performance in Vienna in 1881. It has wonderful melodies, some of them based on Slavonic folk tunes, brilliant orchestration, and a captivating solo part. Sibylle Tschopp and the orchestra did full justice to the music, and at the end the soloist was rewarded with a prolonged ovation.
This was a splendid start to the new season, and the high standard was maintained in Shostakovich’s Symphony No 5 in D minor, Op. 47. This symphony was a sensation when it was first performed in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) in 1937. It is widely varied in mood: at different times it is powerful, sinister, lyrical, solemn, stately, slightly humorous. And, as I mentioned in a pre-concert lecture (to the considerable amusement of my audience) you can even detect at one point in the first movement a brief touch of Andrew Lloyd Webber, who of course wrote his music 40 years later.
Victor Yampolsky knows this work very well. He conducted without a score, and he controlled the entire performance with an admirable grasp of the structure of the symphony as a whole.
This is one of those works that demonstrate dramatically the fact that no recorded performance, on CD or television or radio, is quite the same as a live performance. The Durban City Hall reverberated with Shostakovich’s massive sound effects, and the symphony’s overwhelming conclusion left the audience quite stunned, a moment’s silence, then wild applause. A truly memorable occasion. - Michael Green
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