(Miki Aoki)
Soloist demonstrated delicacy as well as a capacity for playing
with great power and technical prowess of the highest order. (Review by Michael
Green)
A slender, good-looking young Japanese pianist created high
enthusiasm when she played for a Friends of Music audience at the Durban Jewish
Centre.
Miki Aoki started
playing the piano at the age of four and was 12 when she made her debut at
London’s Royal Festival Hall. She had her musical education in the United
States and Germany. She is now based in Austria and is building an
international career as a soloist and chamber musician.
The first half of her Durban programme was dedicated
entirely to 20th century French composers --- Darius Milhaud, Erik Satie, Francis
Poulenc and Arthur Honneger. The music of all of them is unfailingly elegant,
graceful, witty, polished, at times poignant, in a word, French.
Miki Aoki captured exactly the mood of this lovely music,
making light of its rather formidable technical problems and conveying the air
of Gallic virtuosity. Milhaud was represented by a jazzy, catchy piece derived
from the two years he spent in Brazil; Satie by one of his famous Gymnopedies, lean and mysterious;
Honneger by a piece called Souvenir de
Chopin; and Poulenc by various compositions, including a memorable item
called Melancolie, written in 1940
during Nazi Germany’s occupation of France.
After the interval we had The Lark, a beautiful song by the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka
(1804-1857), arranged for piano by Mily Balakirev (1837-1910). Then we moved to
more familiar ground with one of Schubert’s Impromptus, Chopin’s famous Etude
Op. 10 No 3, and the first of his four Ballades.
Here the pianist demonstrated that, in addition to the
delicacy shown earlier, she was capable of playing with great power and
technical prowess of the highest order.
The audience gave her a standing ovation, and in response
she gave an encore, a kind of jazzed up version of George Gershwin’s Summertime.
The prelude performer of the evening, supported by the
National Lotteries Commission, was a 17 year-old soprano, Simesihle Nothando
Nkosi, who is a matric student at Eden College. She was accompanied at the
piano by her teacher, Amina Carini, and, in one of her four songs, by a fellow
student, Tazlo Luke Jacobs. - Michael Green
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