Concert
Music by Bartók, Ravel, Dvorák
Charlene Farrugia, solo piano
MPO/ dir. Jean Marck Burfin
Manoel Theatre
This was a pretty dazzling performance from beginning to end. The Malta Philharmonic Orchestra was conducted with great energy and panache by a guest conductor from France playing to an almost completely full Manoel.
The atmosphere was electric and while looking forward to the whole programme, when a work also involving solo bravura is on board, expectations are great. This was the case with Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.
Charlene Farrugia’s cast-iron concentration never became a rigid exercise
Charlene Farrugia and the MPO did not fail to deliver. This still young and very dynamic pianist has matured a lot and gets ever better. She has always had it in her and while playing ever more brilliantly and intelligently, she has not lost that touch of simple charm and warm rapport, whether with the orchestra or the public.
Her cast-iron concentration never became a rigid exercise but was warm and flexible. She played with a determined ease, being as strong in the sharply marked brilliant and almost aggressive passages as she was tender in the more reflective ones.
Her performance and Jean Marc Burfin’s reading ensured that the oft-quoted remark by the composer himself that “the music of a concerto should be light-hearted and brilliant,” became the case for thus it was delivered. Soloist and orchestra deserved the enthusiastic response of the audience to all this.
The interest in Béla Bartók’s Hungarian Sketches (Magyar képek) Sz. 97/BB103 is manifold. The main one concerning these five highly-evocative pieces is a Bartók more accessible to the wider public than the one whose compositions had followed a far more different path long before 1931, when he reworked some of his earlier piano pieces for orchestra. The orchestration itself is rewarding and the main source of inspiration remains Hungarian folk music with its colourful sound world and interesting rhythms. This was a good choice with which to open the concert and was well projected in performance.
Because of their very nature as sketches tapped from different sources, there was no sense of completion in the Hungarian pieces. Not so with Antonin Dvorák’s Symphony No. 8 in G, Op. 88. From the bold opening brass fanfare to the last fortissimo bars, there was brilliance and dynamism. All sections contributed to a very satisfying reading of this work.
The woodwind often voiced lovely, rich melodies which flowed in profusion throughout the work. This was echoed by the no less crisply phrased strings: often warm, reassuring and idyllically pastoral at times, at others bouncing with life in a richly rhythmic tapestry of sound. This too could not but end in a warmly deserving accolade to director and orchestra.