(Pallavi Mahidhara)
Music by
Mozart and Dvorak, and the appearance of a glamorous top-rank pianist, drew
another big audience to the Durban City Hall for the fourth concert of the
spring season of the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra.
Pallavi
Mahidhara was born in the United States of Indian parents and holds dual
Indian-American citizenship. She is only 26 but she is already a widely experienced
pianist. She played with the KZNPO 18 months ago and made a great impression
with a virtuoso performance of Prokofiev’s third concerto. This time she moved
to the very different musical environment of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Mozart
wrote 27 piano concertos and she played one of the greatest of them all, No. 20
in D minor, written in 1785. This powerful and at times almost sinister work
calls for strong technical skills from the performer plus a highly developed
interpretative insight. Pallavi overcame all the problems and gave a totally
compelling performance.
The
orchestra’s role is of course as important as the soloist’s, and the conductor,
Thomas Sanderling, drew forth some lovely playing from the orchestra. His
restrained style of conducting seemed particularly well suited to the
subtleties of Mozart, and the results were first-rate.
In response
to prolonged applause the pianist played an encore, Liszt’s extremely difficult
La Campanella (the little bell), a
concert etude based on a tune by Paganini. It is an exercise involving rapid
leaps for the right hand, and it was as exciting to see as it was to hear.
After the
interval the orchestra moved on a hundred years, to the Symphony No. 7 in D
minor by the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, a work completed in 1885. Dvorak,
like Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, and they contain much lovely music,
melodious, lyrical, and with the exotic flavour of Bohemian folk music.
The seventh
symphony is dramatic, majestic, energetic, poignant, with many memorable
melodies. The orchestration is
outstanding, with effective parts for all the instruments, and the ending is
stunning, a master stroke of affirmative action (in the musical sense).
Thomas
Sanderling and the orchestra gave a brilliant account of the many moods and
nuances of this grand symphony, and they were rewarded with a tremendous
ovation from the audience.
The concert
opened with another Dvorak work, his joyful Carnival overture, played by the
orchestra with vigour and zest. - Michael Green
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