Weien Amy Luo, Elvin Hoxha Ganiyev, Xizhi Aiden Luo and Neha Parshotam are some of the many young performers featured with the KZNPO during youth month. Here they gather in Durban's beautiful Botanic Gardens.
Image: Val Adamson
The KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra will honouring our youth ahead of Youth Day. This Thursday evening, June 11, is the opening concert of the KZNPO Symphony Season, at 7pm in the Playhouse.
Soloist for the opening concert is Turkish born violinist Elvin Hoxha Ganiyev – a youthful globally recognised much-in-demand concert performer, playing Dvořák’s Violin Concerto in A minor.
Youth Day falls between the first and second concerts in the Winter Season. Ganiyev performs in the first, and in the second concert on Thursday 18 June, the KZN Youth Orchestra will open the programme.
Weien Amy Luo was former KZN Youth Orchestra concertmaster. She's in her first year studying BMus at Stellenbosch University. She will have her first Durban recital concert on July 12 with Friends of Music, at the Durban Jewish Club. Xizhi Aiden Luo is a grade 9 pupil from Crawford international La Lucia. He is KZN Youth Orchestra concertmaster. Both Amy and Aiden got accepted as solo pianists to the Youth Classical Concert alongside with the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra in September. Neha Parshotam is percussionist with KZNYO and is a Grade 10 pupil at Durban Girls College.
The opening concert sees Daniel Boicoto on the podium with music by Beethoven, Dvořák and Brahms. Beethoven’s Egmont Overture was the opening item to incidental music for an 1810 revival of Goethe’s drama about the 16th-century Count Egmont’s campaign to liberate the Netherlands from Spanish oppression.
Written in 1879, Antonín Dvořák’s Violin Concerto in A minor, is celebrated for its integration of soloist and orchestra, its sweeping melodies, and demanding, rhapsodic passages. The piece is one of Dvořák’s most popular and most frequently performed works. Brahms’ Third Symphony was composed in the idyllic Rhine valley in the summer of 1883, and is widely regarded as a masterpiece of late Romantic music.
In the second concert the KZN Youth Orchestra under the baton of maestro Lykele Temmingh performs James Curnow’s spectacular Fanfare and Flourishes; the first movement Mozart’s ‘Little G Minor Symphony’ which was the opening music in Miloš Forman’s 1984 film Amadeus; Brahms’s exhilarating Hungarian Dance No 5; and Mark Lortz’s A Matador’s Tale conjures the teaming energy of a bullfight.
Brazilian-born maestra Alexandra Arrieche then takes the podium with mainstream repertoire by Schumann and Mendelssohn. Schumann’s A Minor Piano Concerto is performed by Italian pianist Federico Colli. Gaining international acclaim for his imaginative interpretations, clarity of sound, and philosophical approach to music-making, Colli won the Gold Medal at the 2012 Leeds International Piano Competition and was named among “30 pianists under 30” by International Piano Magazine.
Mendelssohn's Symphony No 3 or Scottish symphony was written when he was 20 on a visit to Scotland in 1829. He was deeply moved by the wild landscapes, romantic ruins, and dramatic history. The piece evokes the atmosphere of the North, a ‘sombre and moody’ recollection of his Scottish journey.
KZNPO Winter Season tickets are available through the KZNPO office / [email protected] and individual tickets through Quicket. For those preferring not to drive to the concerts, there is a park and ride bus service offered from major arterial points:
Bus tickets though 031 369 9438 or [email protected] and individual tickets through Quicket.