While the Borodin performance
felt a trifle earthbound, especially in its evocative opening, it offered a
fitting airing of the piece in a ‘serious’ setting. (Review by David Smith)
KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra
World Symphony Series, Spring Season, Concert 2 (November 7,
2024)
Rebecca Tong (conductor), Soyoung Yoon (violin)
The Playhouse Opera
As before in recent seasons, the introductory work proved to
be a useful choice: Borodin’s tone-poem of 1880, In the Steppes of Central Asia, has always been a popular favourite
and tends to be corralled in programmes of ‘Light Classical Music’. While the performance felt a trifle earthbound, especially
in its evocative opening, it offered a fitting airing of the piece in a
‘serious’ setting. Besides giving all departments and principals of the
ensemble an opportunity to step forward, it featured a delectable cor anglais
solo in oriental vein.
With regard to the mandatory symphony in the line-up, the 5th Symphony of Dvořák (Op. 76 in F Major) is by no means over-familiar to local audiences, or even among our orchestral musicians, and it poses a particular challenge for a large concert orchestra (by the standards of 1875). It does not stint in distributing its materials to all parts of the ensemble. Everyone plays on high alert, and has something gratifying, and something a little daunting, to bring off. The problem is that, even in its delivery by top-flight orchestras, it lacks even one ‘unforgettable’ melody; it is instead full of motifs and ideas, but not the fully-moulded expanses of a truly Romantic symphony. Even the lyrical focus of the second movement (Andante con moto) is short-breathed. The genuinely novel harmonies we associate with Dvořák’s finest works here still seem experimental.
Sensibly, Ms Tong invested her efforts in the overt energy of the work (three quick movements out of the four), and on that score the performance was a strong one. In particular, a full brass section helped to drive - and crown - the work of all.
The aspects that were lacking in the Dvořák symphony were to a marked degree made up for in an impressive and beguiling rendering of Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, Op. 46, with Soyoung Yoon as the violin soloist. (The instrument designated by the composer as a collocutor to the violin – the harp – might have been positioned more forwardly, to help make Bruch’s point.) Scotland and its music, either the ecossaise country dance or (as here) selected tunes from collections of Scottish airs, exercised a great fascination over 19th-century Europe, and it was to Ms Yoon’s great credit that she aroused just that in her audience. The Fantasy, in four sections, mixes a string of attractive Scottish melodies, often given elaborate variation, with the virtuoso flights of a concerto. Not only was Ms Yoon’s superior technique on display (and again in her encore, a caprice by Wieniawski), but her assured sense of the composition’s twists and turns galvanised the orchestra behind her.
Orchestras and their music represent a unique and important symbol of institutional continuity. The constraints under which this orchestra presently works are not well served by the prevailing system of fast-rotating conductors, and one feels for their (the conductors’) plight in trying to bring off a concert that does them justice with at most three days of rehearsal. For example, the issue of tuning in the orchestra, especially among (and around) the wind instruments, cannot be solved in a trice; one simply had to overlook the unsettled effect that marked the exposed opening of the Borodin work. It is therefore cheering to acknowledge here the recent appointment of Capetonian Chad Hendricks as the orchestra’s ‘house conductor’, and successor to the redoubtable Lyk Temmingh. It is to such people, who lead the ensemble day in and day out, that we look for the standards of excellence that we know can be achieved here. Welcome aboard, Chad! - David Smith
The final concert of
the Season takes place on November 14 in the Playhouse Opera at 19h00.