(Mattia Zappa & Massimiliano
Mainolfi)
Accomplished performers in a well-chosen programme. (Review
by Michael Green)
Two accomplished performers and a well-chosen programme
attracted a big audience to the Durban Jewish Centre for the latest concert of
the Friends of Music.
The players were Mattia Zappa (cello) and Massimiliano
Mainolfi (piano), who are on their sixth visit to South Africa and who played
in Durban some years ago.
Zappa is from Switzerland, Mainolfi from Italy. They formed
their duo partnership 21 years ago when they were studying at the Juilliard
music school in New York. Since then they have established an international
reputation, and it is easy to see and hear why. They are skilful, thoughtful,
sympathetic performers, with a mutual understanding formed by their long years
of association.
As it happened, Zappa was the dominant partner in the
programme of 19th and 20th century music. Mainolfi is a first-rate pianist with
an immaculate technique and strong interpretative insights, but it was Zappa’s
golden cello tone that caught the ear throughout the concert.
They opened with Sergei Prokofiev’s cello sonata Op. 119,
written in 1949. With a melodious and sometimes lyrical character, this is much
more accessible and interesting than some modern music, and the audience
obviously enjoyed it.
This was followed by the Rondo in G minor Op. 94 by Antonin
Dvorak, an expressive and original work by the great Czech composer.
The main item of the evening was Schubert’s Arpeggione
Sonata, written in 1824 for a strange instrument called the arpeggione, a sort
of cross between a guitar and a cello. The arpeggione soon became obsolete, but
Schubert’s work has survived triumphantly in an arrangement for cello and
piano. It is prime Schubert, with a wonderful flow of melody, and the players
and audience revelled in this eloquent performance.
The programme ended with a relatively little known work by
Tchaikovsky, his Pezzo Capriccioso (literally Capricious Piece); attractive,
brilliant and a little sad, typical Tchaikovsky.
In response to prolonged applause, the duo gave an encore, Debussy’s Girl with the Flaxen Hair,
from his first book of piano preludes.
The prelude performer of the evening, supported by the
National Lotteries Commission, was a guitarist, 19-year-old Arianna Carini, a
Durban girl who is now a second year music student at the University of Cape
Town. She played pieces by Manuel de Falla and the Paraguayan guitarist Agustin
Barrios and Stanley Myers’s Cavatina
from the film The Deer Hunter, and
she displayed confidence, a calm demeanour, and considerable technical skills.
- Michael Green
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