(Elna van der Merwe)
Totally
enjoyable performance before a big audience. (Review by Michael Green)
Considering
that there is a large repertory of four-hand piano music, from composers
including Mozart, Schubert, Brahms and Ravel, it is surprising that we do not
have more performances of this excellent form of music.
Two
accomplished young South African pianists, Liezl-Maret Jacobs and Elna van der
Merwe, filled the gap admirably in the latest concert of the Friends of Music
at the Durban Jewish Centre. Playing on one piano – technically a duet, the
term duo being generally used for two pianists at two pianos - they gave a
totally enjoyable performance before a big audience.
They opened
with Mozart’s Sonata in C major, K.521, a mature and captivating work which
Mozart himself described as “rather difficult”, an understatement; it is certainly
challenging, and both pianists surmounted its technical problems with a calm
and confident keyboard demeanour.
Schubert’s
Fantaisie in F minor was the high point of the evening. This is a great work.
It is big, dramatic, dynamic, a complete answer to any notion that Schubert was
just a purveyor of good tunes. The two pianists showed excellent rapport,
balance and clarity in their interpretation of this complex and demanding
music.
The second
half of the programme was devoted mainly to delightful lesser-known short pieces from the 19th
century by the German composers Friedrich Gernsheim and Philipp Scharwenka,
Dvorak and Gabriel Faure, the latter represented by one of the six pieces
of his Dolly Suite, written in the 1890’s for the daughter of his
mistress.
Finally we
had a resounding arrangement by Henry Levine of George Gershwin’s famous Rhapsody in Blue. This was played with
great zest and panache, and the audience gave the performers a standing
ovation.
I hope it
will not be long before we hear these two pianists again, perhaps in some of
the fine four-hand music of the rather neglected Russian composer Anton
Arensky.
In writing
all this, I must confess to a personal bias on this subject. Long ago, I played
a good deal of four-hand piano music with Lara Jones, the gifted Durban pianist
who has lived for the past 15 years in Germany, where she is now a professor of
music in Cologne, married with a daughter. We played mainly for private
audiences and our programmes included the Schubert and Fauré works given at this Friends of
Music concert. I hasten to add that I played as a willing amateur, not a
professional pianist in the class of these ladies. - Michael Green
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