(Pic: Daniel Rowland)Resplendent performance of great masterwork dominated recital. (Review by Michael Green)
A resplendent performance of a great masterwork dominated this recital given for the Friends of Music in the Durban Jewish Centre.
Daniel Rowland was born in London in 1972 and grew up in the Netherlands. Over the past 20 years he has established an international reputation as a solo violinist and as a chamber musician (he is the first violinist in the London-based Brodsky String Quartet). He is on his sixth visit to South Africa. He is a tall, lean man with a fine mop of dark hair and he looks younger than his 38 years. Speaking to the audience from the stage he revealed a pleasantly informal personality.
Pieter Jacobs is South African. He is not only an experienced and accomplished pianist but also has a doctorate in electronic engineering and has presented papers on this subject at international conferences. He teaches at the University of Pretoria.
It was a rainy evening, but a good-sized audience came to the Jewish Centre for this recital, and they were well rewarded. The programme opened with Three Romances by Clara Schumann, wife of Robert Schumann. She was most famous as a concert pianist; she outlived her husband by 40 years and tirelessly promoted his music on the concert platforms of Europe. And she was also a gifted though lesser composer. These three Romances turned out to be attractive and fluent works rather in the manner of Robert Schumann himself. And from the first notes it was clear that we were listening to performers of the first rank, with lovely tone and phrasing from the violinist and sympathetic playing from the pianist.
Then came Beethoven’s Sonata in A major Op. 47, the Kreutzer sonata, a massive and magnificent work. This performance was totally compelling from start to finish. Daniel Rowland is an emotional, rather flamboyant type of violinist, with plenty of body movement. At times he seems almost to dance to the music, and his foot-stamping produced very audible noises which may have been disconcerting to some people in the audience. Perhaps he should wear rubber soles.
Be that as it may, his playing was absolutely outstanding. He captured the intense drama of the music, its power and strength, and the same can be said of Pieter Jacobs at the piano. Beethoven wrote his ten sonatas in this genre for violin and piano, not for violin accompanied by piano. They are equal partners, and the piano part in the Kreutzer is challenging indeed. Pieter Jacobs played with great skill and clear articulation.
After the interval Daniel Rowland played the slow movement of Bartok’s sonata for unaccompanied violin. Bartok wrote this sonata for Yehudi Menuhin in 1944. I heard Menuhin play it a long time ago. It sounded ultra-modern then and it still does, with all that the term implies.
The programme concluded with a fine performance of Cesar Franck’s Sonata in A major, one of this Belgian composer’s best works, notable for the contrapuntal writing in the final movement. Prolonged applause brought forth a Debussy encore.
The Prelude Player of the evening, funded by the National Lottery, was an 18-year-old flautist, Claudia Venter. She showed composure and great promise in two attractive, quite modern-sounding pieces that I had never heard before. The programme gave no titles and no information. There was no announcement from the platform, and the audience were left wondering what they were. - Michael Green