Duo Shines As Violist Sets Pace

The Age

Thursday June 19, 2008

Clive O'Connell, Reviewer

TWILIGHT CHAMBER MUSIC

Rippon Lea Ballroom, Ripponlea, June 15

www.teamofpianists.com.au

ONE of the National Academy's leading lights, violist Stefanie Farrands, took part in the latest Twilight Chamber Music recital sponsored by the Team of Pianists.

Farrands collaborated with Robert Chamberlain in a program that featured three duos, the pianist working through some Bach and Beethoven solos. The artists began with a work usually reserved for an encore: Astor Piazzolla's Le Grand Tango. This gave Farrands plenty of room to display her instrument's powerful warmth and biting drive, despite the viola's reputation as the string section's sleeping partner.

The duo took on more wrenching material with Hindemith's Viola Sonata in F Major from the Op. 11 collection, one of the post-World War I chamber works at the outset of the composer's active compositional career. From the opening solid Fantasie, Chamberlain kept well up to the dynamic mark of Farrands' slashing bow strokes. If anything, the sonata gained in aggressive forthrightness as it moved through the sets of variations that comprise the work's later movements. The young violist clearly enjoyed the situation of being out from under.

Chamberlain played a carefully delivered sequence from Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier - the first four preludes and fugues. Effortless in their fluency, the collection made its strongest impression in the C sharp fugues, the whole complex of eight works treated with Chamberlain's usual calm and considerable scholarship.

© 2008 The Age

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