(Pic: Cara Hesse and Laura Pauna)Appreciative audience take great pleasure in KZNPO rarity programme. (Review by Michael Green)
The splendid sight of two very grand pianos on the stage greeted members of the audience as they entered the Durban City Hall for this concert given by the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra.
The programme was a rarity – two concertos, each for two pianos, one from the eighteenth century and one from the twentieth, the composers being Mozart and the Frenchman Francis Poulenc. The repertory for four-hand piano music is quite large (it was a popular form of home entertainment in the days before television and radio) but there are very few two-piano concertos. Apart from these two, the only others I can think of are by Bartok, Milhaud and two by Mendelssohn. And Mozart also wrote a concerto for three pianos!
This was therefore an unusual concert, and it gave great pleasure to an appreciative audience. The conductor was Naum Rousine, from the orchestra’s own staff, and the pianists were Cara Hesse and Laura Pauna. The programme note was remarkably coy about their background, but they are South Africans, both graduates of the University of Cape Town. They have been playing together for ten years and have performed frequently in the United States and many countries in Europe.
They quickly demonstrated the close cohesion one would expect from so long-standing a partnership. Mozart wrote his Concerto No. 10 for Two Pianos in E flat, K.365, in 1779 for performance by himself and his sister Nannerl, also a gifted pianist. It is taxing work for the performers; nimble fingers are needed here. Cara Hesse and Laura Pauna delivered a performance of high quality, with glittering technique in the good-humoured outer movements and the delicate touch in the delightful piano dialogue of the Andante.
In this work and in the Poulenc they read the music from the score, a process which involved much rapid page-turning. I always find this a bit nerve-racking, but there were no mishaps. The Poulenc concerto, written in 1932, is a wonderful work - brilliant, quite jazzy, boisterous, romantic, with a touch of music from Bali for good measure (Poulenc had heard Balinese music at an exhibition in Paris and was fascinated by it). Cara Hesse and Laura Pauna played with great skill and the right degree of flamboyance. My only criticism is that the lovely middle movement, Larghetto, was taken too fast for my taste.
The orchestra were in fine form, enjoying the sheer exuberance of Poulenc’s music.
The concert opened with a gripping account of Mozart’s Overture to Don Giovanni, which is an intensely dramatic beginning to what many people (including your humble scribe) regard as the greatest of all operas.
And it ended with four items from Aram Khatchaturian’s Spartacus Suites, concert arrangements of the music for the ballet, the best known piece being the Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia, which is famous mainly because it was the theme music in a long-running British television series, The Onedin Line. - Michael Green