(Aristide
du Plessis & Christopher Duigan)
Display of virtuoso talent. (Review by William
Charlton-Perkins)
KZN music lovers are currently the
beneficiaries of a new spirit of collaboration between Durban’s Friends of
Music (FOM) and Christopher Duigan’s Pietermaritzburg-based Music Revival
associations. This welcome trend saw the latter offering up a combination of
two of its recent programmes that have been performed across the province,
telescoped into one, for the benefit of FOM’s audience at the Durban Jewish
Centre last night (Tuesday, April 10).
Performing something of a double bill,
pianist Duigan shared the stage with cellist Aristide du Plessis in the first
half of the evening. With both instrumentalists presented as equal partners,
this showcased the emotive vocality of cello as a solo instrument, with a
selection of items built around Rachmaninoff’s towering Sonata for Cello and
Piano in G minor Opus 19.
An ‘easy lift-off’ was effected as the two
musicians played an engaging coupling of Ave
Maria settings by Caccini and Piazzolla. Du Plessis then stepped up to the
microphone to introduce the Rachmaninoff masterwork. He highlighted the impact
the work left on him as a nascent soloist, when as a young teenager, he heard
the great Russian cellist Alexander Ivashkin play it at a FOM recital 13 years
ago. The experience of being privy to Ivashkin’s account of the work is best
encapsulated in Du Plessis’s own words, as recounted in an interview he gave me
a while back: “He had the most beautiful, enormous tone which just made the
hall spin. I was very moved, even as a child, by how every movement of the work
had so many beautiful melodies, and of all different types - pensive, profound,
heroic, tragic, desperate, romantic, and joyous. Every emotion and feeling is
in this piece, especially the third movement.”
Dedicating his own performance of the work,
that heart-rending third movement in particular, to the late Russian maestro,
made listening to Du Plessis’s own sublime rendering of it especially poignant.
I can only say my admiration for this young artist-in-our-midst continues to
grow with every hearing of his thriving young maturity I am privileged to
witness on our concert stages. His breath-taking virtuosity in Tchaikovsky’s
show-piece, Pezzo Capricioso, brought
the first half of the evening to a close with a welcome emotional reprieve.
Having more than held his own in
dispatching the very considerable demands, both emotional and technical, that
are embedded in the piano part of the Rachmaninoff work, the indefatigable
Duigan proceeded to astonish his audience with a further display of virtuosity
– both his own as a performer, and that of the endlessly fecund – but, to my
ears, essentially cerebral – facility of George Gershwin. We were treated to
superfine performances of the American composer’s widely-contrasting Three Preludes, followed by exquisitely
played accounts of the composer’s own transcriptions, contained in the spun out
Gershwin Song Book. Then onto the
well-tried Rhapsody in Blue, rendered
in its barnstorming solo piano edition. If the pianist wasn’t ‘wrung dry’ after
delivering such an onerous programme, this listener certainly was as its
recipient. What a feat!
Mention must be made of the evening’s
remarkable young Prelude Performer, the gifted bass singer, Ruben Mbonambi.
With a velvet-textured vocal instrument of rare and authentic tonal depth and
colour, he delighted his audience with a beautifully phrased performance of
Sarastro’s great aria, O Isis und Osiris
from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and a deliciously knowing
account of Don Basilio’s scurrilous aria, La
Calunia from Rossini’s The Barber of
Seville. This amazing young man was accompanied by Bobby Mills. – William Charlton-Perkins
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