Recital
Marco Misciagna, violin, Vito Vilardi, guitar

Young they may be but they are an extremely accomplished duo. So very well-knit, balanced and complementary are they that they give the impression they have been performing together for years.

That they have been studying and performing since they were little more than toddlers is true; but as a duo, Marco Misciagna and Vito Vilardi have only been performing for just a year.

Regarding their performance at the church of Santa Marija ta’ Bir Miftuħ, this was some of the finest music ever to permeate that ancient ambience. Festivals like this one, where standards get better and better, are a reminder as to how blessed is “din l-art ħelwa” of ours with so many top-quality musical events in both islands.

The obscure Christian Gottlieb Scheidler’s Sonata in D was a welcome last-minute addition to the planned programme and came first in order of performance.

The duo immediately established their command of the music and one could say that Mr Misciagna’s tone, its purity and limpid qualities were established from the first note and was there to stay throughout the evening. He performs with complete absorption in the music and with rock-hard, steadfast concentration.

Because of the nature of most of the works chosen this evening, the violin was the predominant member of the duo. The Schiedler sonata is a charming in which the guitar has an accompanying role and had some fleeting prominence when it introduced the lovely romance of the middle movement. Of similar fleeting prominence was its imitation of a drum roll at the beginning of Ferdinando Carulli’s Fantasia e variazioni sulle arie de “La Gazza Ladra” di G. Rossini. This was a brilliant performance with the variations treated in alternating both with lyrical smoothness and fast virtuoso playing. Mauro Giuliani’s Duo Concertante Opus 85 is most likely that composer’s most famous and popular work. It is an expansive, four-movement work with the expected contrasts. The guitar has a more prominent role in this work and is not merely the violin’s accompanist.

Both performers combined their forces to present a very homogeneous charming work wherein all the various shades and colours were amply projected.

I particularly liked the andante molto sostenuto which also came across as molto dolce e cantabile; but then there was nothing to fault the opening the dignified allegro maestoso, the playfully witty scherzo and the superb delicacy of the concluding allegretto espressivo.

Music by Niccolò Paganini is de rigueur for such a formation because after the violin, the guitar was that wizard’s favourite instrument.

The Opus 2 set of six sonatas for violin and guitar are short works in two contrasting movements, compact, concise and requiring great technical and expressive skill, prominence being the domain of the violin. Nos. 1, 2 and 6 were performed, one lovelier than the other. They were followed by Sonata VI from another Paganinian source and which ended in a vigorous rondo.

The two encores, performed with muted violin were simply magical. The first one was a superbly controlled yet very intense Granada by Albeniz. Nana, from de Falla’s Siete canciónes populares is meant to be a lullaby and performed as such.

Rather than lull me into blessed sleep, it whet my appetite for more music from this duo, but of course this good thing had to come to an end.