2015 is a very special golden jubilee year for Din l-Art Ħelwa ... it was founded in 1965 by Judge Maurice Caruana Curran who died recently. Also commemorated was tenor Paul Asciak, who died last month and who, for seven years, was vice-president of DLĦ.
Sharing this moving homage was also the memory of Alistair Chalmers, an extraordinary young man and one-time DLĦ volunteer activist.
Chalmers’s family founded the ADRC Trust in his memory and it was they who sponsored the opening concert of this now solidly established international music festival.
Equally and very family-oriented was the trio formation of pianist Elisabeth Conrad, her sister Maria Conrad (violin) and the latter’s Spanish husband José García Gutiérrez playing the French horn.
The programme was well-chosen and balanced with a strong Castilian/Catalan flavour with a dash of German, French and Russian music.
Some of the music was in arranged versions, while other versions were original.
The Conrad sisters hail from a very musical family and have been used to performing together for a long while. In some works, Gutiérrez added his own contribution to the sisterly rapport with a dose of harmony and the result was simply and truly great.
Balance and harmony reigned throughout
This showed well enough in Frédéric Duvernoy’s Trio in C Major for piano, violin and horn, arranged by R. Ostermeyer. Balance and harmony reigned throughout with a lovely adagio followed by an allegretto.
In both movements there was a sharing of thematic material performed with great style. The horn’s warm legato was truly cantabile and so it was to remain.
Even more scope for that marked the interpretation of an original work for horn and piano by Carl Reinecke. In his Nocturne in E flat Major, Op. 112, the horn’s tone was suave and soothing with a piano providing a gently decisive support.
This support was also present when the two sisters launched into another German piece Brahms’s Sonatensatz, WoO 2. This scherzo in G minor is bold and very turbulently exuberant and both piano and violin projected to the full its menacing facets, which were only just less agitated in the brief trio section.
Granados’s Danza Española N.5, known as Andaluza and originally for piano, is widely known in a very popular solo guitar version. It was performed in an arrangement for horn and piano by Kazimierz Machala in a combination that made it as if it were for the duo born.
There was no mistaking its highly Spanish flavour with its colourful rhythm and again the horn was as cantabile and warm as could be. Maria Conrad returned to the fray in an expectedly great arrangement for violin and piano by Fritz Kreisler. It is of a Danza Española in A Minor taken from Manuel de Falla’s La Vida Breve.
The violin excelled in this work, which combines technical virtuoso passages with an equal wealth of feeling and highly charged passion. It was after this work that Elisabeth Conrad took a break from her fundamentally important role of accompanist because what followed was the concert’s only solo horn work.
An original piece by the Russian composer Vitaly Buyanovsky, España is from a four-piece suite of solo horn improvisations or impressions. It came across most evocatively in various brief sections and with often deliberately longish intervals which added to the tension. Gutiérrez’s superb musicianship shone in his overcoming of the technical pitfalls Buyanovsky plants along the performer’s path.
The trio’s conclusion consisted of Canciónes y Danzas Ns. 7 and 8 by Catalan composer Federico Mompou. Originally for piano this arrangement was by Gabriel García Martínez, José’s father. These charming miniatures retained a marked intimacy in the opening slow sections with highly contrasting and extrovert dance rhythms and patterns.
They were very warmly received and a call for an encore was conceded with Carlos Gardel’s tango La Cabeza.