Two young SA musicians gave an evening of
undiluted pleasure. (Review by Michael Green)
Two outstanding young South African
musicians gave an evening of undiluted pleasure when they played for the
Friends of Music at the Durban Jewish Centre.
Jacqueline Martens, violin, and Sulayman
Human, piano, presented a most attractive programme ranging from Mozart to
modern, and did so with high technical skills and artistic insight.
Jacqueline Martens, a tall, elegant
22-year-old, was born in South Africa but has spent most of her life in
England. Her grandparents were Belgians who moved to Durban a long time ago.
Sulayman Human (23) is from the Western
Cape and has won several performing competitions.
They are an admirable musical partnership.
Jacqueline has a virtuoso technique, well displayed in some of the very
difficult pieces she played. At the piano Sulayman played with vigour, accuracy
and conviction. And the tonal balance between the two performers was
first-rate.
They opened with a relatively little-known
Adagio in E major, K. 261, by Mozart, a lovely tranquil piece, and followed
with another calm and much more famous composition, the Meditation from the
opera Thais by Jules Massenet
(1842-1912).
We moved to a bigger field with Richard
Strauss’s violin sonata, written in 1888, when the composer was 24 and in love
with the woman he subsequently married. It is an ardent, lyrical, compelling
work, technically demanding, and the players extracted full value from it.
Beethoven’s Sonata in D major, Op. 12 No.
1, dating from 1798, may not be the finest of his 10 violin sonatas but it is
nevertheless irresistible music and it provided for me the high point of the
evening. The players captured exactly the mood of melodious good humour (and
advanced ideas for its time), never more so than in the second variation of the
middle movement, with flowing violin and rippling piano.
Something new was provided in a work called
Laumereva by the South African composer
Hendrik Hofmeyr, who was born in Cape Town in 1857. It is ethnic music,
referring to mythical people in Zimbabwe and imitating an African instrument.
Written for unaccompanied violin, it bristles with technical difficulties, and
these were surmounted with aplomb by Jacqueline Martens.
This exceptional recital ended with an old
favourite, the Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso, written by Camille
Saint-Saens in 1863.
The prelude performer of the evening,
supported by the National Lotteries Commission, was a soprano, Lungile Cele, a
17-year-old pupil at Northlands Girls’ High School. Accompanied at the piano by
Bobby Mills, she displayed a good, well-controlled voice and a pleasant,
unaffected stage manner. - Michael Green
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