(Conductor
Daniel Raiskin)
Resplendent Strauss.
William Charlton-Perkins reviews the third
Early Spring Season concert of the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2018
Word Symphony Series in the Durban City Hall on September 6, 2018.
Durban’s music community has been reeling
under the shock of the recent death of Simon Milliken. Thursday’s penultimate
concert of the KZNPO’s Early Spring Season was dedicated to the memory of the
much loved British musician, who for many years was the Orchestra’s Principal
Double Bass player. Before the programme started, Russian conductor Daniel
Raiskin led a moving account of Elgar’s Nimrod
in tribute to Milliken, ending the piece with a profound interlude of silence.
Don
Juan, Richard Strauss’s sumptuous early symphonic
tone poem, opened the bill. The Orchestra played their hearts out for their
lost colleague in this music by his favourite composer. It seems invidious to
highlight stand-out moments. But mention must be made of the gossamer-fine
rendering by Acting Concertmaster Violeta Osorhean of her exquisite little
violin solo. And too, the exultant unleashing of the soaring French horns, a
typical feature of Strauss in his most exuberant moments. In all, this was music-making
from the whole orchestra to set the pulses racing.
(Soloist
Vitaly Pisarenko)
The first half of the evening concluded
with a performance of Liszt’s episodic Piano Concerto No 2, whose hushed
opening passage for winds, magically ushering in the soloist, always strikes
one listening to this piece as a masterstroke of innovation by the
great Hungarian master. Belying his diminutive physical stature, Vitaly
Pisarenko dispatched an astounding display of virtuosity and tonal power, both
in his solo interludes and in the dazzling interplay with the Orchestra
throughout Liszt’s brilliant score, in which Boris Kerimov made time stand
still in his cello solo.
Taking us on a trip down Bohemia’s great
Moldau River, Smetana’s Vltava from Má Vlast opened the second half, underscoring
as ever the marvellous work’s deserved standing as one of Western music’s most
evocative pieces of descriptive writing.
The evening ended with an all-stops-out
account of Warren Bessey’s recently-completed Symphonic Fantasy, Inkosazane Mkabayi. With its focus on
the 19th Century Zulu historic figure of King Shaka’s formidable aunt, the
Princess Mkabayi Kajama, dubbed ‘the King-Maker’, whose dramatic entrance into
life foreshadowed not only the shape of her own destiny, but also that of the
Zulu nation, this grandiosely-conceived work offered a grateful platform for
the Clermont Community Choir and the line-up of soloists to show their musical
paces to fine effect. The soloists were Avuya Ngcaweni (soprano), Siphokazi
Maphumulu (soprano), Sizakele Masuku (alto), Wayne Mkhize (tenor) and Andile
Dlamini (bass).
Their and their orchestral partners’
whole-hearted account of the score only partially disguised the derivative
nature of the piece’s easy-listening musical content – which, to my ears,
suggested a reach-out to the big-moment sound worlds of Puccini’s Turandot, Orff’s Carmina Burana, even Andrew Lloyd Webber, given a colourfully
orchestrated Afro make-over.
My response to this premiere performance
seems to have been a lone one. The house shouted its approbation at its
conclusion. – William Charlton-Perkins
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