Gifted brother and sisters partnership display
a musical inter-relationship that is absolute. (Review by Michael Green)
Presenting a programme of music that is
seldom performed, the Trio Broz gave much pleasure to a big Friends of Music
audience at the Durban Jewish Centre.
This trio is a brother and sisters
partnership. Barbara Broz plays the violin, Giada Broz the viola and Klaus Broz
the cello. They come from a town near the Italian/Austrian border and their
musical background is from those two countries. They are good-looking, young,
in their thirties I would guess, and over the past 20 years they have given
more than 500 recitals in many parts of the world.
They are all gifted players and, obviously,
their musical inter-relationship is absolute.
They opened with a delightful movement from
an incomplete string trio by Schubert, written in 1816 when the composer was 19
(he was only 31 when he died). This music, classified as Schubert’s D. 471, has
many of the imprints of his later great works, and the Broz Trio played it with
extraordinary clarity and tonal purity.
The main work of the evening was
Beethoven’s String Trio Op. 9 No. 1, which dates from 1798. Beethoven’s five
string trios have been overshadowed by his many other compositions in the
chamber music genre, but they are all worth hearing, and this one, in G major,
is perhaps the best of them.
The performance was outstanding. It is no
doubt invidious to single out one player, but Klaus Broz’s magnificently
resonant cello tone was particularly memorable.
After the interval came two rare items: a
trio by Jean Sibelius, the Finnish composer best known for his symphonies, and
a trio by the contemporary Argentinean composer Luis Bacalov, an advanced kind
of work with strong rhythms and almost perverse dissonances.
The highly appreciative audience included
many faces not often seen at these Friends of Music recitals. Maybe some of
them will become regulars.
The Prelude Performer of the evening,
funded by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund, was a flautist,
17-year-old Sakhile Humbane, a pupil at Durban High School. Expertly accompanied at the piano by
Liezl-Maret Jacobs, he showed impressive skills as he played flute music by
Vivaldi and by the French composer Henri Dutilleux, who is now 97 years old. - Michael
Green
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