Strung Along As Ning Gets To Heart Of Matter In Brahms Concerto

The Age

Friday February 22, 2008

Clive O'Connell, Reviewer

SIDNEY MYER FREE CONCERT NO. 3

Myer Music Bowl, February 20, www.mso.com.au

SELBY & FRIENDS 1

Melba Hall, February 20, www.selbyandfriends.com.au

RECENTLY winning first prize in the Paganini and Michael Hill violin competitions, violinist Feng Ning has been a real find for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, as well as patrons of the free Myer Bowl concerts. Taking up the challenge of a repertoire stalwart, Ning gave a persuasively argued and balanced reading of the Brahms Violin Concerto on a bleak Wednesday evening, leading off a program that then moved into Ravel's brief Pavane and the Strauss tone-poem Death and Transfiguration.

Beginning with an arresting account of the solo part's opening flourishes, Ning quickly found the heart of this great-hearted concerto, shaping its ornamental work with polished care and keeping firm hold of the work's melodic integrity, especially in the score's high places, like the slow-moving emergence from the opening movement's cadenza and the urgent move to 6/8 time at the end of the finale.

As with German cellist Nicolas Altstaedt last Saturday, conductor Alexander Shelley provided his soloist with a committed, professional backdrop, the MSO strings forthright in ensemble and oboist Vicki Philipson giving Ning a splendid partner- line in the work's central F major Adagio: intervals of lucid calm in the guest violinist's taxing flurry of multiple stops and slashing scale passages.

AT Melba Hall, Kathryn Selby and her TriOz partners - violinist Niki Vasilakis and cellist Emma-Jane Murphy - were joined by popular violist Irina Morozova in unfamiliar music by well-known names.

For most of us, the Mendelssohn Piano Quartet in F minor, written in the composer's early teens, was probably being heard live for the first time. Already, the composer displayed that precocious fluency that came to full flower three years later with the great String Octet, but this quartet writing blends its instrumental forces with considerable craft, even if the piano enjoyed sustained prominence. Selby relished the composer's rapid-fire passage work, notably in the outer movements, while Vasilakis and Morozova balanced the ledger with some duet work of high distinction.

After interval, the players worked through the Brahms Quartet in A major, the most substantial of the composer's three products in this form which took this recital into over-time. Once again, the group moved on to a higher level of achievement for the works' slow movements, the Mendelssohn's Adagio an object-lesson in ensemble control and dynamic subtlety, only outclassed by the equivalent pages in the Brahms work, where you wished that an already substantial movement could have been longer.

© 2008 The Age

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