CONCERT: Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra - The concert began with the Maskarade Overture by Nielsen, whose lifetime spanned the years before and after 1900.  

PROGRAMME: Music by Grieg, Nielsen, Sibelius
SOLOIST: Antonio Pompa-Baldi
CONDUCTOR: Michal Dworzynski
VENUE: Linder Auditorium, Parktown

The overture is bright and even raucous and was played with enthusiasm by the JPO under the baton of the Polish visiting conductor, Michal Dworzynski.

  In Grieg’s immensely famous Piano Concerto in A minor, the soloist was Antonio Pompa-Baldi, a young Italian blessed with steely fingers.

  The concerto was strongly aggressive in the outer, fast movements, replete with accelerated octave and chord progressions and seldom Romantic in the customary manner for a 19th century work.

The overall effect was of technical assurance coupled with a rather stern approach to the warmth of the music.

The slow movement, fortunately, was something of an oasis of charm.   Ensemble with the orchestra was virtually flawless, what with the conductor and the soloist watching each other closely.

  Predictably, there was a huge ovation,  to which the pianist responded with Grieg’s Notturno in C major, one of the composer’s “Lyric Pieces”.

The  rhythm was sadly inaccurate – a fault that can be heard in the recordings of a number of pianists.

The concert closed with the Fifth Symphony of Sibelius, written nearly 100 years ago.

It still sounds “modern”, and the playing throughout the concert sounded much more sonorous than the small size of the orchestra initially promised.