(Transcendent
Brahms - William Charlton-Perkins reviews the second Winter Season concert of
the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2018 World Symphony Series)
(Conductor:
Brandon Phillips)
Thursday’s second concert of the KZN
Philharmonic’s winter season (June 14) marked two notable debut guest
appearances. The award-winning young Cape Town conductor Brandon Phillips made
his bow with a programme which pleasingly included some off-the-beaten-track
repertoire, as a departure from the usual concert staples.
Schumann’s brooding Genoveva Overture proved a substantial curtain-raiser, its richly
symphonic writing proclaiming the German composer’s marked affinity for the
concert hall as opposed to the opera house. If its opening bars were briefly
marred by a touch of impure intonation from the orchestra’s first violins,
happily this settled as the work got under way. Phillips’s steady baton
effectively guided the piece’s slow, pensive take-off along its dramatic
course, highlighting passages such as Schumann’s enchanting deployment of the
French horns to evoke the hunt, before reaching a triumphant, heraldic climax.
(Soloist:
Alexander Buzlov)
The evening’s second debut saw Russia’s
new-generation cello star Alexander Buzlov taking the spotlight. This
engagement marked a highpoint in recent World Symphony Series events, which
have chartered many of classical music’s most acclaimed celebrities since its
inception 22 years ago.
Echoes of Spain resonated authentically
throughout Buzlov’s spine-tingling performance of the declamatory Cello
Concerto in D minor by Edouard Lalo, a clear indication of the work’s genetic
affinity with its sibling, the composer’s more famous Symphonie Espagnole for
Violin and Orchestra.
A pupil of the great Natalia Gutman, Buzlov
is now one of the world’s frontline soloists. His formative years included
close affiliations with a royal line of pedagogic giants such as Mstislav
Rostropovich, Danil Shafran and Bernard Greenhouse. No mere name-dropping here:
the remarkable young artist’s pedigree showed in every moment of his
electrifying mastery of Lalo’s taxing work.
The Brahms symphonies are consistently self-renewing
works, none more so than his deeply satisfying F Major Third Symphony which one can listen to forever without
losing that magical sense of discovery experienced on first hearing.
Brandon Phillips’s finely nuanced rendering
of this joyous masterwork touched home base at every juncture of its complex
structure, his virile, expressive reading delivered with impressive control and
a fine sense of balance in the many key passages during which members of the
orchestra get to shine.
A stand-out moment was the lyrical playing
emanating from the orchestra’s principal clarinet desk, dreamily leading the
narrative forward like an integral spokesperson fully conversant with the
emotive landscape around him.
Phillips and his players passed the supreme
test of performing this magical work, by bringing their audience safely home in
the breathtaking final bars with a sense of wonder that hung in the air for
suspended seconds after the last fading decibels had died away. Brahms at his
most transcendent. – William Charlton-Perkins
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