(Above: Conductor Daniel Boico and soloist Yi-Jia Susanne Hou)
KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra. World Symphony Series
- Early Spring Season 2025 Concert 2. The Playhouse Opera. September 4, 2025.
Review by David Smith
This concert had a marked feeling of festive finality to it.
As the second of just two early spring concerts - in lieu of a proper symphonic
season – it was also a book-end. Even as the orchestra clings to its mandate,
the weekly progress through symphonic repertoire has been truly gutted, and the
‘frame’ of a season, a short burst of large works, is apparently what we must
now get used to.
Daniel Boico’s programme began with a landmark overture, Mendelssohn’s “The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave)”, and he fully invested the orchestra in a marine and meteorological fantasy of remote skies and surging sea. In fact, though the score passes through several climactic moments, the music left the impression of a long gathering of sound into one great wave (at the end of the re-transition, for the technically-minded), its breaking and subsiding. The performance showed decisively that you don’t have to attend the Berlin Philharmonic to hear the genius of this tonal architecture revealed.
Though it remained firmly within the Romantic purview, the programme then took the road of technical virtuosity with Yi-Jia Susanne Hou, the Canadian violinist, expounding the second violin concerto by Henryk Wieniawski. A clue to her reading was obvious from her encore, a scorching account of Paganini’s Caprice No. 5. Commenting on her own recent one-take performance of all 24 Caprices, she said “I wanted to see what extremes a human can reach.” This was also true of her encore, though the push to the technical limit was subject to the law of diminishing returns. Much of her stupendously rapid bowing actually produced an un-aesthetic effect.
Such was not the case in the concerto, where her interpretation –a wilful and vivid one – was held in check by the partnership with the orchestra, in particular the strings. That said, there was a degree of scampering involved as the ensemble tried to keep up with her quick cornering. She highlighted the bravura passage work of the first movement (which is actually nicely mixed with broader expressive ideas in ‘introverted and musing’ style, as the programme notes said), and let the cantilena of the second movement float suspended above the orchestra’s chordal and textural procession. The last movement, referring to popular European ideas of gypsy music, is frankly intended for solo display, and that was magnificently realised.
What gave this concert its distinction was Schubert’s 9th Symphony, known as ‘the Great’. That refers to its length (which runs to nearly fifty minutes even without important repeats) as well as the sense that Schubert’s ambition to compose a work on a par with Beethoven’s greatest symphonies was finally realised.
The symphony steers clear of the dramatic conflicts in which Beethoven excelled, yet can hold the listener over the long span, as was evident from the rapt attention of the audience. Their lusty approval at the close testified to Boico’s success in building the cumulative impact across the four movements. It is fair to single out soloists (horn at the start, oboe in the second movement), but the thrust of this symphony is the way in which it employs ‘choirs’ of instruments in juxtaposition and in combination. In that respect, the orchestra’s execution was consistently convincing and seemed to gather force and brilliance as it proceeded. I took particular delight in the second movement (Andante con moto), which had a scope and density worthy of Bruckner.
Great, indeed! – David Smith