(Myfanwy
Price & Liesl-Maret Jacobs. Photo by William Charlton-Perkins)
Recital duo in full flight. (Review by
William Charlton-Perkins)
Virtuoso oboist Myfanwy Price took her
Friends of Music concert audience by storm at the Durban Jewish Centre last
night, February 6. Accompanied by Liesl-Maret Jacobs, the young British
musician was making her solo debut appearance in the city since her appointment
to the KZN Philharmonic’s principal oboe desk last year. It was heartening to
see a number of her colleagues in the audience in support of the event.
The evening opened on a light-hearted note
with a performance of the Morceau de
Salon by the Czech composer, Johann Kalliwoda (1801 – 1866). The piece
proved a delicious early example of the palm court salon music genre that
prevailed later in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Price and Jacobs
dispatched its lilting strains with infectious élan.
Their performance of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin offered a
surprise. Originally conceived as a neo baroque suite of six pieces for solo
piano, subsequently scored for orchestra, Ravel wrote the work between 1914 and
1917 in memory of friends who had died during the Great War. Here it was given
in an arrangement for oboe and piano by Christian Schmitt and Laurent Riou.
This proved revelatory for its sparkling
interplay of instrumental colours, giving fresh insight into Ravel’s lively
writing. Jacobs’s subtly articulated playing, alternately delicate and boldly
assertive, matched Price’s joyous trajectory of Ravel’s ever-changing moods -
bustling playfulness subsiding into an air of calm, then giving way to carefree
skipping and prancing gaiety. Marvellous stuff.
Price’s bent for individual programming was
further in evidence in the item that followed - The Sapphire by the contemporary British composer David Heath (b
1956). Dedicated to his daughter after whom the piece is named, it superbly
evokes the sounds of bagpipes, heard in the distance across the fields as the
composer was out walking on the day of his child’s birth. Jacobs’s restrained
touch at the piano sparsely suggested the drone of the pipes during the piece’s
haunting opening strains, giving way to Price’s exuberant oboe in free fall,
indulging in a joyous Scottish dance.
Robert Schumann’s Adagio and Allegro,
originally scored for French horn and piano, fared well in the transcription we
heard for oboe and piano, the players astutely highlighting the work’s strong
affinity with a Romantic bel canto opera aria and cabaletta.
After intermission we were treated to
further rarities. A lusciously full-blown account of Eugène Bozza’s Fantaisie Pastorale offered Price a
platform to display her bravura skills in a dazzlingly climactic cadenza. Henri
Dutilleaux’s Sonata for Oboe and Piano offered further atmospheric
mood-setting, the composer’s sharply-etched writing conveying an idiosyncratic
flow of ideas in this early piece from his oeuvre.
By way of a palate cleanser, the starkly
scored Pieskarieni for solo oboe,
written by Pēteris Vasks (b 1946), eerily realised the composer’s intention of
evoking the dark forces of nature in conflict with humanity (as introduced by
Price before her remarkable performance of the piece).
The programme ended with an all-stops-out
account, spectacularly delivered by Price in full flight, of the Themes and
Variations from Donizetti’s Opera, La
Favorita by Antonio Pasculli (1844 -1924).
Prelude performer Tyrell Pillay proved an
adept interpreter of Slonimsky’s Modhin
Russo-Brasileira, Debussy’s billowing Arabesque No 1 and Heller’s Prelude
in C sharp minor, offering up Granados’s Andalusia
as an encore. - Review by William Charlton-Perkins
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