(Martin
Panteleev)
Two brothers with an intense musicality
present splendid performance. (Review by Michael Green)
Two brothers from Bulgaria, in south-east
Europe, scored a major success when they appeared with the KZN Philharmonic
Orchestra in the Durban City Hall.
Martin Panteleev, from Sofia, was the
conductor and his brother, Vesko Eschkenazy, was the violin soloist. The latter
has assumed his mother’s maiden name for professional purposes.
Aged about 40, they make an interesting
comparison, the conductor tall and elegant, the violinist stocky and
concentrated. What they have in common, of course, is an intense musicality and
this communicated itself to the audience in a splendid performance of
Mendelssohn’s much-admired Violin Concerto in E minor.
Vesko Eschkenazy produced an ineffably
sweet violin tone in this most lyrical of compositions, and the orchestra
responded admirably to Martin Panteleev’s fraternally sympathetic direction,
capturing all the graceful and delicate nuances of Mendelssohn’s music.
The concert opened with Bulgarian music,
Pantcho Vladigerov’s Vardar, a
colourful rhapsody written in 1922, with many complex rhythms and catchy melodies
from folk music.
And the evening ended with a rousing and
warmly applauded performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s wonderfully vivid Scheherazade, his musical version of the
Arabian Nights stories that beguiled
a murderous sultan for a thousand and one nights until he changed his ways. - Michael
Green
Posts
