(Alexander Preda & Yvonne Timoianu)
Highly
accomplished artists with a close musical rapport. (Review by Michael Green)
Yvonne
Timoianu, cello, and Alexander Preda, piano, formed their musical partnership
28 years ago and named it Duo de Salzburg after the city where they were and
still are based, Salzburg, the city of Mozart.
As one
would expect, they are both highly accomplished artists with a close musical
rapport, and they gave much pleasure to the Friends of Music audience when they
played at the Durban Jewish Centre.
Their
programme consisted mainly of unfamiliar music, but they began in a traditional
kind of way with a Divertimento in D (“an amusement”) by Joseph Haydn. This
delightful set of pieces showed immediately the quality of the players, a
lovely rounded tone from Yvonne Timoianu’s cello (which was made in Milan in
1721) and deft and subtle playing by Alexander Preda at the piano.
The next
item was a complete contrast, a piece for solo cello called Karamahe, by the Austrian composer Klaus
Ager, who was born in 1946. The cellist explained beforehand that this was not
a piece for a mellow cello but was designed to show the capabilities of the
instrument, and, she added disarmingly, it was only three minutes long! Some
strange sounds followed, interesting but not exactly lyrical.
Then came
Schubert, represented by arrangements by Yvonne Timoianu of items from the
great composer’s melancholy and rather cheerless set of songs called Winterreise, Winter Journey. Here again the playing was excellent, the
pianist very effective and sympathetic, the cellist sometimes altering her tone
skillfully to fit the mood of the music.
A little
piece called Cello Up, written by a
young Austrian composer, Katharina Schirk, and dedicated to Yvonne Timoianu,
was a brief and entertaining novelty.
The
programme was completed with a Sonata in C major by Erwin Schulhoff, an
Austrian who died at the age of 46 in Nazi concentration camp, music that was
modern but melodious and accessible; and the suite “Enchanted … Papageno”, arrangements of the most famous arias from
Mozart’s Magic Flute.
The Prelude
Performer of the evening, funded by the National Lottery Distribution Trust
Fund, was Daniel Bedi, a 14-year-old pianist from Kearsney College. He showed a
good technique, and a sense of style unusual in one so young, as he played an Allegro by Johann Nepomuk
Hummel (1778-1837), a Tarantella by the Prussian-American composer Albert
Pieczonka (1828-1912), and the first of the three Mouvements Perpetuels by the 20th
century French composer Francis Poulenc. - Michael Green
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