All that glitters truly is gold when Israeli flute sensation Sharon Bezaly launches into a concerto written for her by Uruguayan composer Jose Serebrier.
Bezaly, who lives in Sweden and has been dubbed the David Oistrakh of the flute, plays a 24-carat Japanese instrument which has a slightly mellower sound than the conventional silver model.
The 37-year-old former child prodigy showed her phenomenal technique - super-fast tonguing, circular breathing and faultless fingering - in the largely solo Cadenza before dazzling her Angel Place audience with an “inconclusive tango” and a harum-scarum presto finale.
Making her Australian debut, Bezaly first impressed her audience with an effortless performance of Carl Vine’s challenging work, Pipe Dreams, written in 2003 for the ACO and the Swiss Emmanuel Pahud, perhaps the only other contemporary flautist to rival the Israeli.
As well as her wonderful playing, Bezaly comes across as an engaging performer with no pretensions and a good line in humour. When she found herself blocking the audience’s view of violist Christopher Moore in his solo passage she skipped out of the way with a comical shrug to leader Richard Tognetti.
The other works on the program featured the orchestra, which was in particularly fine form for the warm-hearted romanticism of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for strings.
Handel’s concert grosso Op 6 No.7 moved along at a measured but well-considered pace and the hornpipe finale put listeners in a good mood for the revelation of the evening, the latest new work to celebrate Tognetti’s 20-year tenure as the ACO’s artistic director.
Latvian composer Peteris Vasks is an artist who deals with the big issues: nature, the beauty of life, world survival and, biggest of all, love.
His fantasy for violin and string Vox amoris lasts for 10 minutes, but it seems longer - not because it drags but because it has so much to say in such a beautiful way.
Tognetti’s $10 million fiddle was heard to great effect in two dramatic cadenzas where the virtuosity lay in the dramatic double-stopping and unison passages rather than thrilling runs. Intonation was slightly off-kilter in a couple of places but this mattered little.
The solo’s Cantilena lovesong sang out over the string ensemble, starting with a whispery tremolo but gradually building in passion and drama before subsiding to a slightly melancholic, post-coital mood.
For me this was the most satisfying of the season’s Tognetti tributes, the Vine and Peter Sculthorpe’s pieces notwithstanding.
Hopefully the ACO will bundle them all up in one CD package to add to their already impressive body of recorded work.
Review by Steve Moffatt from Parramatta Advertiser
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment