(Alexander Lubyantsev)Glittering performance by Alexander Lubyantsev of brilliant and delicate piano score. (Review by Michael Green)
A programme of two great romantic composers, Frederic Chopin and Robert Schumann, drew another good house at the Durban City Hall for this third concert of the KZNPO’s summer season.
The presence of dozens of schoolchildren was a welcome sight. They were probably non-paying guests, but the policy of trying to inculcate a love of good music in the young is obviously a good one.
The visiting Japanese conductor Yasuo Shinozaki is well-known here, and his intense and committed performances always arouse enthusiasm. He is, predictably, a small man, but he thinks big on the podium, and his flamboyant style seems to stir the orchestra to great efforts.
The soloist of the evening was the 25-year-old Russian pianist Alexander Lubyantsev. He played Chopin’s Concerto in E minor, Op. 11, listed as the first of the composer’s two concertos but actually written after the No. 2 in F minor.
It is a lovely work (written in 1830 by a 20-year-old) and Lubyantsev, a slightly-built young man with a calm keyboard manner, gave a glittering performance of the brilliant and delicate piano score. In the slow movement, in particular, he produced an exquisite gentle singing tone that held the audience spellbound, and he was rewarded with prolonged applause at the end. He responded with an encore, Chopin’s thunderous (and very difficult) Etude in C minor, Op. 25, No. 12.
After the interval, the orchestra gave us Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 in C major, Op. 61, another anomaly in numbering; it is actually Schumann’s third symphony but is called the second because it was published earlier than No. 3.
It is a big, serious work, written in 1846 when the composer was beginning to experience the first signs of the mental illness which led, 10 years later, to his ending his days in an asylum. No sign of that here, however. It is an eminently sane work, with a beautifully expressive slow movement and a second movement in which the ceaselessly scurrying violins present a musical idea of great originality.
Yasuo Shinozaki took the orchestra through this complex symphony with great skill and insight, and the triumphant conclusion brought an excited ovation from the audience. - Michael Green
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