Two highly accomplished performers excel in
Friends of Music’s first recital of 2014. (Review by Michael Green)
For their first recital of 2014 the Friends
of Music presented two highly accomplished performers who gave a programme of
music that was not unfamiliar but was pleasantly distant from the very
familiar.
The violinist Joanna Marie Frankel is
concert master of the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra. Christopher Duigan, one of
the most gifted, industrious and versatile pianists in South Africa, is based
in Pietermaritzburg. Both them are of course very well known here and a big
audience turned up at the Durban Jewish Centre to hear them play.
They opened with Mozart’s Sonata in E minor
K 304. Mozart wrote about 35 sonatas for violin and piano, and this is one of
the finest. Written in 1778, soon after the death of Mozart’s mother, it is a
two-movement work in melancholy mood. The second movement is particularly
beautiful, with poignant melodies, and both performers excelled in the entire
sonata.
Edward Elgar’s only violin sonata, in E
minor, Op. 82, is one of the composer’s late works, dating from 1918. In brief
remarks from the platform, Joanna Frankel made clear her great admiration of
this music. It has many lovely moments, but I think performances of it are
likely to remain occasional, as has been the case for many decades.
In a recital of very high standards the
Brahms Sonata No 3 in D minor, Op. 108, produced what was to my ears the best
playing of the evening. At the piano Christopher Duigan who had had a fairly
subdued role in the Elgar, came into his own here as he delivered Brahms’s
bold, broad phrases (displaying in the process his formidable keyboard
technique).
The virtuoso passages were executed with
great skill by both players but the most memorable moments came in the slow
movement, which held the audience in a kind of trance as its beauties were
unfolded.
The final item on the programme was Manuel
de Falla’s Danse Espagnole, from his
opera La Vida Breve, arranged for
violin and piano by Fritz Kreisler. This brilliant and captivating Spanish
music brought forth prolonged applause and shouts of Bravo.
The Prelude Performer of the evening,
supported by the National Lottery Distribution Trust Fund, was the pianist Ewan
Slabber, a 17-year-old pupil at Glenwood High School. He showed confidence, a
calm platform demeanour, and technical skills beyond his years as he played the
first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata in E major, Op. 14, No. 1, and
Mendelssohn’s Andante and Rondo Capriccioso. - Michael Green
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