(Bryan Wallick)Exciting and stimulating evening. (Review by Michael Green)
Music ranging from the very familiar to the totally unfamiliar was presented in the Durban City Hall when the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra gave its first concert of the winter season.
Unfortunately the audience was rather sparse, thanks to the violence which accompanied a taxi drivers’ protest in the city centre earlier in the day. Those who stayed away missed an exciting and stimulating evening.
We had a new conductor, an energetic, enthusiastic and skilful young Spaniard named Josep Vicent, and a brilliant young American pianist, Bryan Wallick, who has played in Durban before.
The first half of the programme was occupied by Brahms’s massive Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat, which runs for about 50 minutes. For the pianist, this work is a formidable technical and interpretative challenge, and Bryan Wallick produced a virtuoso performance that earned him prolonged applause at the end.
After the majesty and thunder of the first two movements, the Andante comes as a period of blissful repose, music of another age, and it brought forth what I felt was the best playing of the evening.
Wallick played a fascinating encore, the third of four Excursions for solo piano written about 70 years ago by the American composer Samuel Barber.
The rest of the programme took us into the 20th century with three works by Spanish composers, Joan Valent, Joaquin Turina and Manuel de Falla, and one by an Argentinian, Astor Piazzolla, the king of the tango.
The most impressive was the Pangaea Overture by Joan Valent, who was born on the island of Mallorca in 1964 and is a man, not a woman as his name might suggest. Pangaea, Greek for “the entire earth”, is a word used to describe the vast continent that later separated into today’s land masses. Valent’s overture has a primeval quality, with an explosive opening and then a long slow crescendo with repetitive themes and relentless rhythms. All most impressive, and brilliantly played, and the audience greatly enjoyed it. - Michael Green
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