(Cobus du Toit & Patrick Sutton)
Excellent performance from accomplished players and engaging personalities. (Review by Michael Green)
An evening
of music for flute and a guitar is distinctly unusual, and so is a programme
that features composers such as Takemitsu, Puglo and Beaser, names that are
unfamiliar to most concert-goers.
Nevertheless
a reasonable-sized audience turned up at the Durban Jewish Centre for a Friends
of Music concert given by Cobus du Toit, flute, and Patrick Sutton, guitar.
They are
both accomplished players and engaging personalities, and their programme was
not nearly as forbidding as it might have sounded from the advance
announcement.
These two
young performers, who are on a month-long tour of South Africa, both live in
Boulder, Colorado, a city of about 300,000 inhabitants at the foothills of the
Rocky Mountains.
Cobus du
Toit, a South African, is a graduate of the 140-year-old University of
Colorado, in Boulder. He has played the flute in South Africa, Japan, Europe
and the United States, and he is the principal flute of the Boulder Chamber Orchestra.
Patrick
Sutton was born in Colorado and is at present studying for a doctorate in music
at the University of Colorado.
As for the
composers, Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996) was a distinguished Japanese musician
(his work has been heard in Durban before), Maximo Diego Pujol is a guitarist
who was born in Argentina in 1957, and Robert Beaser was born in Boston,
U.S.A., in 1954.
The
programme was on more familiar ground with the inclusion of works by Astor
Piazzolla (1921-1992), the tango king of Argentina.
His set of
four pieces called Histoire du Tango
opened the concert and it presented an interesting contrast in the tones of the
two instruments, the flute dominant, with the more penetrating sound, the
guitar producing rhythm and harmony in the background. The playing was
excellent.
Then came
three interesting pieces by Takemitsu called Toward the Sea. One of them, Moby
Dick, derives its title from Herman Melville’s novel and is a kind of
sailing music.
We returned
to Argentina with two eloquent, slightly melancholy pieces by Pujol, and then five pieces by Robert Beaser, Mountain Songs, took us to the
Appalachians, an area that is rich in American musical folklore.
The Prelude
Performers of the evening, supported by the National Lottery Distribution Trust
Fund, were two oboe players, Nina Alborough and Nompilo Mathe. With Maggie
Deppe at the piano they gave a confident and skilful account of a
three-movement oboe duet by the Italian baroque composer Tomaso Albinoni
(1671-1751). - Michael Green
Posts
