(Christopher Duigan &
David Salleras)
Exploration of mainly unknown musical territory turned out
to be a most enjoyable journey. (Review by Michael Green)
An exploration of mainly unknown musical territory turned
out to be a most enjoyable journey in the latest concert of the Friends of
Music at the Durban Jewish Centre.
The performers were Christopher Duigan of Pietermaritzburg,
who is one of South Africa’s best-known pianists, and David Salleras of
Barcelona, Spain, who has an international reputation as a saxophone player and
has visited South Africa regularly over the past five years.
A good-sized audience heard them present a consistently
interesting programme of a dozen items for this rather unusual combination of
instruments.
They opened with a Fantasie
by Jules Demersseman, a Frenchman who died in 1866 at the age of 33. This
composer was a friend of Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone, and he
produced some of the first works ever written for the instrument.
This Fantasie
seemed to me to be quite advanced for its time. It exploited admirably the
rich, penetrating tone of the saxophone and called for extreme dexterity on the
part of both players. They responded with a brilliant performance.
An unexpected item was a Sonata in G minor by Bach, written
originally for flute and harpsichord. It was lively and delightful.
Five of the shorter works in the programme were written by
Christopher Duigan himself. They showed him to be an accomplished and often
humorous composer, three of his works were entitled First Round, Drowning your Sorrows, and Bar Stool Tango. All very entertaining, with sophisticated and
virtuoso parts for the piano.
Saxophonist Salleras played one of his own compositions, an
unaccompanied piece called Mi Bailora
based on Spanish flamenco music. Written in a modern style and played with
great skill and panache, it caused something of a sensation among the
appreciative listeners.
The programme was completed with more familiar and
unfailingly attractive 20th century music, two numbers from Darius Milhaud’s Scaramouche Suite (written originally
for two pianos) and two by Astor Piazzolla, the Argentine king of the tango.
The prelude performer of the evening, supported by the
National Lotteries Commission, was Luxolo Mahlasela, a tenor who is a
third-year music student at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Accompanied at the
piano by David Smith, he gave impressive and expressive performances of arias
from Haydn’s oratorio The Creation
and Donizetti’s operas L’elisir d’amore
and Don Pasquale. - Michael Green
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