(Junnan
Sun, Christopher Duigan & Aristide du Plessis)
Christopher Duigan’s performance of Handel’s
Chaconne in G, HWV 435 was the high point of the evening. (Review by Michael
Green)
The Trio Frontier is an unusual combination
of three KZN musicians who have performed together in Durban, and have done so
with distinction.
They are Christopher Duigan, piano; Junnan
Sun, clarinet; and Aristide du Plessis, cello. The latter two are members of
the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra. Christopher Duigan is based in Pietermaritzburg
and is one of South Africa’s best-known pianists.
For their latest concert for the Friends of
Music at the Durban Jewish Centre they chose a programme featuring their
instruments individually rather than collectively. Predictably, Christopher
Duigan was the busiest; he had to play as an accompanist as well as a soloist.
The programme consisted of eight fairly
short pieces covering a wide range of style and sentiment. And they were all of
strong audience appeal, in spite of the fact that they were probably unknown
territory to many listeners.
Christopher Duigan opened with a
magnificent Chaconne in G, HWV 435, by Handel. For me this was the high point
of the evening. The composition, consisting of 21 variations, has an ineffable
grandeur, and Duigan’s virtuoso interpretation was totally compelling.
Later he showed virtuosity of a very
different kind in Ravel’s Alborada de
gracioso (Morning Song of the Jester), Spanish in character and exceptionally
difficult to play.
Junnan Sun, who was born in China and has
lived in South Africa for the past 14 years, demonstrated his remarkable skills
in the Introduction, Theme and Variations for clarinet by
Gioachino Rossini. This composer is of course best known for his operas, and
this clarinet work, written about 200 years ago, has a distinctly operatic
tinge.
Later in the programme Sun played two more
clarinet pieces: a Shalom Aleichem by
the contemporary Hungarian composer Bela Kovacs, and a Carmen Fantasy written for violin by Pablo de Sarasate and arranged
for clarinet by the French composer Nicolas Baldeyrou, who was born in 1979. All
very interesting, and showing that the clarinet can on occasion produce big and
even violent sounds.
The cellist Aristide du Plessis, who was
born in Durban in 1989, displayed a lovely mellow tone in Max Bruch’s
well-known Kol Nidrei and in an Elegie by the French composer Gabriel
Faure (1845-1924). And he later ignited some fireworks in Tarantella by David Popper (1844-1908), a Bohemian cellist.
The three performers assembled together for
the only time in the concert when they gave an encore, a Beethoven slow
movement. At the end they were rewarded with an ovation from an appreciative
audience.
The prelude performer of the evening,
supported by the National Lotteries Commission, was Sandile Mabaso, a tenor who
is a staff member at Kearsney College. Born in KZN, he is an experienced and
mature singer with a pure, accurate voice and a controlled, expressive
technique. He gave much pleasure in singing three German lieder by Beethoven
and Schubert. - Michael Green
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