KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra
World Symphony Series - Early Spring
Season 2025 Concert 1
The Playhouse Opera
August 28, 2025
(Conductor Brandon
Phillips proved able to galvanize and meld a group of regulars, both
experienced and new to the game, and a cohort of now ever-present extra players
into a remarkably coherent ensemble. (Review by David Smith)
Capetonian Brandon Phillips returned to KZN to conduct the first of two symphony concerts that mark our ‘early spring’. He proved able to galvanize and meld a group of regulars, both experienced and new to the game, and a cohort of now ever-present extra players into a remarkably coherent ensemble. He also had three compositions that proved excellent vehicles for the opening of a ‘season’.
Like much of the music associated with the end of his life, Mozart’s overture to The Magic Flute (1790) concisely encapsulates his habits with sonata-form construction and keeps returning to the contrapuntal textures that increasingly fascinated him. The result is a brief and potent curtain-raiser, prefaced by three famous solemn chords and then discharging its impulsive energy in fugal sections. There was nothing perfunctory about Phillips’s approach to this celebrated overture which received a full measure of commitment.
Before the orchestra proceeded to its account of Borodin’s Symphony No. 1 (written 1862 - 66), we were treated to an authoritative account of Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 5, with the young Japanese pianist, Keigo Mukawa, as the soloist. It is the finest of Saint-Saëns’s five concertos for the instrument, each of them a distinct musical world unto itself.
Two YouTube recordings capture Mukawa performing the concerto in important competition performances (2019 and 2021) in what feels like a signature work for him. The hallmark of his approach was aptly described as ‘extreme refinement, subtlety and sensitivity’. Though his once-unaffected stage presence has changed somewhat (he wore an ill-fitting black smock, and crouched noticeably over the keyboard), the personality in the music is – delectably - the same.
If his interpretation of the work (which is fantasia-like, especially in its first movement) has shifted, it is toward a more forthright reading, making for incandescent passages of virtuosity. But the sense of reserve is still present, and his mastery of the composer’s jeu perlé (fast, light ribbons of sound) - makes of the central movement, built around a Nubian love-song, a point of profound equilibrium. The often-discrete orchestral contribution was also finely played and directed.
Mukawa chose to repay his quite justified standing ovation with Chopin’s Nocturne in C-sharp minor, returning us to an intimate, delicate world of outstanding tonal beauty. Regrettably, there was no other opportunity to hear him on this trip to Durban.
Borodin’s first symphony, also his first extended work, is not a well-known concert piece, but it certainly deserves to be less obscure than it is. From the outset, it unfolds a multiplicity of ideas with rhythmic vigour and melodic turns of phrase that are characteristic of his better-known creations. Influences from ‘abroad’ are detectable, but the music plays with them and builds them into larger tone pictures.
Phillips favoured a bold, extrovert reading, and succeeded in balancing resplendent passages from the brass with the rest of the hard-working orchestra. His Scherzo (2nd movement) was tautly laid down by the strings, and the lyric Andante suitably spacious. The woodwind soloists were entirely convincing, apart from some indifferent solos on the cor anglais; the woodwinds as a section, though, sometimes lack good internal tuning. And there were atmospheric moments, often layered in perspective in the orchestration, which passed without too much consideration.
That did not dispel the impetus of the work which is at times truly thrilling, and the audience signalled its satisfaction at this scarce opportunity to hear Russian music of the 1860s in all its colourful detail. - David Smith
The second – and final – concert of the Early Spring Season will take place on Thursday September 4, 2025, in the Playhouse Opera, at 19h00. Tickets available through Quicket.
To link to the KZNPO’s website, click on the advert at the top right-hand of this page.
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