(Second violin tutti
player Deidre Cicilie and Second violin, Cadet Nicola Botha preparing for Vaughan
Williams’ Lark Ascending. Photo by Shelley Kjonstad)
Concert 1 of the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra’s World
Symphony Series took place in The Playhouse Opera on November 6, 2025. (Review
by David Smith)
While the KZNPO proceeds with its policy of two-concert
seasons, its sister orchestra in Johannesburg luxuriates in a four-concert
stretch. Durban benefits from some of the visiting conductors and artists
arriving in the country. Interestingly, the Cape Town Philharmonic’s current
five-concert summer season shares with its national counterparts only one
artist, the violinist Jack Liebeck.
It has to be said that in him they have picked a winner. Liebeck dominated the first half of last Thursday’s concert in the most felicitous way, by pairing Vaughan Williams’s Romance for violin and orchestra, The Lark Ascending, with Saint-Säens’s Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso in a composite ‘concerto’ that, however unlikely a hybrid on paper, together made a tasteful and appealing impact.
The lark-inspired piece is a great favourite, evoking not only the English countryside in a quieter age but opening a vein of mysticism that shines through the finest of Vaughan Williams’s music. Quite apart from his impeccable intonation, Liebeck’s playing invested the highly embellished line with a purity and directness that disarmed the listener from the first sounds.
There was nothing ‘technical’ about the effects of swooping, wheeling and fluttering: the ‘magic’ arose from the soloist’s masterly bowing, which was sweet, infinitely sensitive to gradations and ‘breathing’, and in both its sonorous and aerial qualities, added up to an authoritative account, to which conductor Daniel Boico joined the sustained orchestral surging with wonderful effect.
Saint-Säens wrote his work with an exceptional young soloist in mind – Pablo de Sarasate – and provided a languorous prelude that gives way to a swaggering, mercurial rondo of jewel-like brilliance. Liebeck rendered it with satisfying poise, and a vigorous despatch of the showy passages that dot the composition, over the orchestra’s thrumming gestures.
The purely orchestral items of the concert were Mozart’s Don Giovanni Overture (1787) and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, ‘Eroica’ (1803). The former is a pungent seven-minute preamble to the opera that manages to communicate both its solemn drama and its racy energy, even with the change of context from theatre pit to platform, and the over-assertive concert ending that replaces the run-on structure of the overture into Act 1. The work had barely begun when the primacy of the string-playing became obvious, and the contest for a balance with the wind instruments was commenced. Boico gave what he could (more of that below), but the music was largely in the hands of the ensemble, and they showed a determination to make this revered overture ‘work’.
Using orchestral forces that correspond closely to Mozart’s, the Beethoven symphony is a challenge of a different order. Again, the strings had to strive for their place in the aural picture, and punched above their limited number. But this symphony is an unprecedentedly lengthy work (double the duration of most of its predecessors), which, quite apart from the mental stamina required, demands the utmost responsibility from all the players. Boico made it clear, by his gestures and in his sonic detailing, that the sweep of the work required long-phrase thinking to support the rich surface variety. Inasmuch as the orchestra assumed this task, it proved capable of rising to the heights of this composition. (The horns, for example, featured beautifully in the scherzo.) But it takes a settled and alert body of players to dovetail the varying rhythmic patterns of the funeral march, and some of that proved nervous stuff. Likewise, the complex wind contributions work to greatest advantage when their tuning is finely calculated: this was sometimes not the case.
All the sterling work delivered, however, will provide a basis in the coming week for the second of these symphonic excursions. - David Smith
The second – and final – concert of the Spring Season will take place on Thursday, November 13, 2025, at 19h00 in the Playhouse Opera.
Tickets are available at Quicket outlets. For more information, call 031-369 9438, email bookings@kznphil.org.za or visit www.kznphil.org.za
To link to the KZNPO’s website, click on the advert at the top right-hand corner of this article.
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