(Jacques Imbrailo)
Baritone singer of top rank for Friends of
Music. (Review by Michael Green)
Jacques Imbrailo is a name that is probably
unknown to most South African music-lovers, but in a recital for the Friends of
Music at the Durban Jewish Centre he showed that he is a baritone singer of the
top rank.
He has a strong South African background. He
was a pupil for some years at the Drakensberg Boys’ Choir School - he started
his musical life as a boy soprano - and he has degrees in law and music from
Potchefstroom University. He went to England nearly ten years ago to study at
the Royal College of Music and since then he has built a big reputation in
opera and as a concert singer.
Accompanied at the piano by Bonita
Ziegelmeier, who is on the staff of Kearsney College, he presented in Durban a
programme that was well off the beaten track, with a strong emphasis on early 20th
century English music; not everybody’s cup of tea, but his sheer artistry
carried a large audience with him all the way.
He has a relaxed, unaffected stage presence
and a really big voice, powerful, accurate, resonant. He has the professional
polish acquired with careful training:
well-judged phrasing, a calm demeanour, and controlled dynamics, the
strong tone sometimes dropping to a lovely pianissimo.
He opened with Ralph Vaughan-Williams’s
nine Songs of Travel, written between
1901 and 1904, atmospheric pieces of varied mood. They were delivered with
authority and affection. Bonita Ziegelmeier was a discreet and accomplished
piano partner here, as she was throughout the evening.
Moving to the different world of late German
romanticism, Jacques Imbrailo sang three songs by Richard Strauss with emotion
and style. Then came another change of scene with Liszt’s Three Petrarch Sonnets¸ written in 1839 and better known as piano
solos. This beautiful music breathes the
spirit of Renaissance Italy, and Imbrailo extracted full value from its long
melodic lines.
Finally we were given six songs from the
cycle called A Shropshire Lad by
George Butterworth, who was killed in the First World War at the age of 31.
They are settings of poems by A E Housman and they are poignant, elegant, and
melancholy, in a way a summation of the composer’s brief life.
I don’t think the audience went home after
this concert humming the tunes, but they will remember the singer.
The Prelude Performers of the evening were
staff and pupils from Kearsney College, instrumentalist and singers, performing
Bach and traditional Christmas songs. - Michael Green
Friends
of Music acknowledge the support of the National Lottery Distribution Trust
Fund.
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