(Ben Schoeman)
Virtuoso performance of brilliant work. (Review by Michael
Green)
A virtuoso performance by the South African pianist Ben
Schoeman was the dominant feature of the second concert of the KZN Philharmonic
Orchestra’s spring season, in the Durban City Hall.
He played the Piano Concerto No. 5 by the French composer
Camille Saint-Saens, a brilliant work replete with lovely melodies and extreme
difficulties for the pianist.
This concerto is sometimes called The Egyptian because Saint-Saens, an enthusiastic traveller, wrote
it during a stay in Egypt in 1896. It has exotic themes and effects, and the
pianist’s role is challenging, to put it mildly.
Ben Schoeman surmounted the technical problems splendidly,
and produced a beautiful tone in the work’s many lyrical passages. The
orchestra, with the widely experienced Ukrainian American conductor Theodore
Kuchar on the podium, were in very good form, and the audience gave prolonged
applause at the end of an outstanding performance.
The concert opened with Antonin Dvorak’s Midday Witch, one of the composer’s
lesser known works, a symphonic poem based on a rather macabre children’s
story. It is dramatic and vivid, and it was well played.
Finally we had Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No 6 in B
minor, which dates from 1939. It starts with a solemn slow movement, which is
as long as the other two movements put together, and ends with a kind of comic
gallop. Very noisy, and brilliantly scored for the orchestra.
The audience was noticeably smaller than that which had
attended the previous concert with music by Mendelssohn and Brahms, and a
substantial number left at the interval, before the Shostakovich. Programmes
obviously affect attendances. - Michael Green
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