Energetic Interpretation Delivered With Panache
The Age
Monday August 29, 1994
Leslie Howard in Recital. The Mozart Collection Series No. 3: violin Deborah Fox, conductor Brett Kelly. Hawthorn Town Hall, Sunday.
Twilight Chamber Music at Rippon Lea Series No. 4: oboe Anne Silby, violin Robert Macindoe, piano Darryl Coote. Rippon Lea, Sunday.
IN THE first half of his piano recital, Leslie Howard worked through Beethoven's Op 22 sonata in B flat and Schubert's Fantasia in C, the `Wanderer'. Both works were treated with energy and dedication, making considerable impact in this small and remarkably appropriate theatre for this type of concert.
There is an ever-fascinating sense of challenge about the Schubert Fantasia, the pianist is inevitably tested in the fire of its demands, both technical and emotional. Howard did not come off unscathed, but the damage consisted of superficial scratches, not serious wounds.
His interpretation impressed as dynamically intense and vital, the slow segment (where Schubert cites his own song) making a sombre effect in an environment of crashing virtuosity which reaches its apogee in a set of dangerously testing arpeggios that thunder down with taxing consecutiveness from the top of the keyboard: tremendously exciting music, here brought off with some miscalculations but admirable panache.
IN Hawthorn, Brett Kelly's Academy of Melbourne leavened an orthodox program - Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Vivaldi - with the Melbourne premiere of Andrew Ford's Pastoral for String octet. In this piece, the composer expresses his own impressions of rural life, successfully free of the associations that Beethoven or Handel's music generate.
Ford sees country life as pretty rough, if not grim. Judging by his Pastoral, you wouldn't want to experience farm life if you had the option. The music's mood is often strident, never mellow or euphonious, uneasy even in its quiet ending, there are no larks ascending in Ford's landscape.
Deborah Fox played the solo part in Bach's A minor violin concerto with a fine, soaring timbre in the andante and a ringingly clear series of decorative arches illuminating the stolidity of the final allegro.
The concert concluded with Haydn's Symphony No. 85, `La Reine', performed in competent and confident style if not as sparkling as it might have been in the middle movements, nor as cleanly achieved as is customary with this group of players. To compensate, the presto finale came across with persuasive gusto.
THE final recital sponsored by Max Cooke's Team of Pianists and the National Trust Rippon Lea featured Darryl Coote supporting both Robert Macindoe in sonatas by Mozart and Grieg and Anne Gilby in sonatas by Poulenc and Michael Easton.
Both violin sonatas make heavy demands on the pianist and Coote did not have the happiest of times with Mozart's K 379. Every imperfection shows up in this music and there were several during the opening movement. Happily, the G major Grieg sonata requires solid delivery from its interpreters and both Coote and Macindoe worked impressively through the heavy rhythms and stirring folk music-indebted harmonic novelties prefiguring the composer's great Slatter for piano.
Anne Gilby not only gave us the moving Poulenc sonata, written in memory of Prokofiev, and Michael Easton's 20-year-old essay in the form dating from the composer's student days - and thankfully showing flashes of the composer's wit. She also contributed Schumann's Three Romances and Ohana's Neumes, in both partnered expertly by Coote who again sounded much more confident with these works than he had with the initial Mozart.
Gilby spoke before each work she played. I think we were all grateful for her exegesis on the Ohana work, although her observations focused on the pictorial qualities of the music and its performances' peculiarities rather than the piece's shape, which was ultimately impenetrable. But the rest of her program could have been left to speak for itself, especially the Schumann group.
© 1994 The Age
