KZNPO CONCERT: SEPTEMBER 30, 2010

Enjoyable, instructive and encouraging evening made for a successful concert. (Review by Michael Green)

This was not the usual symphony concert in the Durban City Hall but the annual National Youth Concerto Festival, an occasion that proved enjoyable, instructive and encouraging.

This youth festival was established by the then conductor of the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra, David Tidboald, in 1983. It has become a rewarding tradition. Every year the orchestra’s resident conductor, Lykele Temmingh, travels far and wide in South Africa in search of top musical talent. He chooses the people to play in this concert, and he chooses well. This time, as in previous years, there were no disappointments and there was plenty of high promise.

Lyk Temmingh himself was the conductor at this latest event. The opening item was a Concert Overture No. 2 by his brother Roelof Temmingh, who recently retired as professor of composition at Stellenbosch University. The Temmingh family came to South Africa from Holland in 1958 and have made a significant contribution to the cultural life of this country.

The orchestra for this overture was not the KZNPO but a combination of the KZN Youth Orchestra and the Bochabela String Orchestra, 31 players from Bloemfontein. The result on the City Hall stage was impressive: 50 strings and 20 woodwind and brass players. A large proportion of them were young black instrumentalists, a really hopeful sign for the future. And they played with skill and confidence as they tackled Roelof Temmingh’s contemporary work. The music is modern but not aggressively so, very accessible in fact. Nevertheless, it must have been quite an advanced piece for such young players, and they rose to the challenge splendidly.

This was a stimulating start to a concert in which the standard of performance was consistently high. The large numbers then departed from the stage to be replaced by a mere 17 players from the KZNPO, these for the Vivaldi concerto which followed. The soloist was 15-year-old Fladia Buongiorno, a very small and attractive young lady playing a very small and attractive instrument, the sopranino recorder. This resembles a piccolo: the pitch is high, the volume of sound is limited, hence the small orchestra. The music was delightful: Vivaldi’s Concerto in C major, RV 444. Rather unusually, the second movement, a gentle aria for soloist over a pizzicato accompaniment, was played first, then the more vigorous first movement.

Then came another woodwind player, Sally Minter, a flautist from Cape Town. She is a student at the College of Music but already has wide experience of playing in orchestras. She showed her expertise in Cecile Chaminade’s Concertino for Flute and Orchestra. Chaminade (1857-1944) was a French composer popular in her lifetime but almost forgotten today. This concertino, which has been recorded by James Galway, is a graceful and gentle display of late nineteenth century romanticism, rather Victorian in mood and sentiment. Pleasant, and well played.

The evening’s five other soloists, two of them with Eastern backgrounds, chose more familiar ground to show their skills. All of them played with the aplomb of seasoned professionals. Jane Yu gave a confident and powerful account of the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3; Junnan Sun played the third movement of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto; Tobias Kotze, cello, played Max Bruch’s beautiful Kol Nidrei; Lieva Starker the third movement of Bruch’s Violin Concerto in G minor; and Francois Botha the first movement of Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto.

All of them showed abilities and musical perceptiveness beyond their years.

A most successful concert. - Michael Green