(Wolfram Christ. Photo
by Reiner Pfisterer)
Orchestra in splendid form under Wolfram Christ’s baton.
(Review by Michael Green)
Two big works by Johannes Brahms were the main items in the
KZN Philharmonic Orchestra’s first concert of the summer season, in the Durban
City Hall.
The Brahms Double Concerto for violin and cello runs for
about 35 minutes and is not played very often, partly because it calls for two
highly accomplished soloists and partly because it is not quite as accessible
for audiences as most of this master’s output.
It is complex and serious, but it is fine and memorable
music, all of which was admirably presented in this KZNPO performance. The
soloists were both South Africans, Pieter Schoeman, violin, and Anmari van der
Westhuizen, violin, and the conductor was the distinguished German musician
Wolfram Christ.
Born and educated in South Africa, Pieter Schoeman is now
the leader of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Anmari is a Stellenbosch
graduate who is now a music professor at the University of the Free State.
Both are outstanding players, and they handled the
difficulties of Brahms’s score with calm and conviction, while extracting
maximum value from the power and beauty of the music. The slow movement in
particular brought forth lovely, eloquent playing.
Under Wolfram Christ’s baton the orchestra were in splendid
form, with a performance that drew enthusiastic applause from the big audience.
The second major work of the evening was Brahms’s Symphony
No 2, which runs for about 40 minutes. This is Brahms in a relaxed mood – he
wrote the work while spending a summer at an Austrian lakeside town – and
Wolfram Christ guided the orchestra through a subtle yet forceful
interpretation, again much to the pleasure of the audience. He is a restrained
type of conductor but he certainly obtains the required result, in this case
big sound from a big orchestra.
The concert opened with Carl Maria von Weber’s delightful
overture to his opera Oberon, first
produced in London in 1826. Weber conducted the first performances but
collapsed and died a few weeks later, aged 39, one of the many composers who
didn’t make it to 40. Others included Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Mendelssohn,
Bizet and George Gershwin. Short lives, big achievements. - Michael Green
Posts
