Flawless virtuosity at The Courtyard

1:16pm Tuesday 30th September 2008

ON Monday evening Hereford Concert Society’s 10th season opened in fine style when its patron, celebrity cellist Julian Lloyd Webber, generously presented a warm-hearted fundraising recital at The Courtyard. The meat of his varied programme was to be found in Cello Sonatas by Debussy and Brahms (No.1), which Lloyd Webber performed with effortless technical mastery, drawing an enormous range of colour and dynamics from his wonderful 1690 Barjansky Stradivarius. Such works are essentially integrated duos, and particular praise must be awarded to the curiously unsung pianist Pamela Chowhan, who met the formidable demands of both sonatas with flawless virtuosity, despite the inability of the Courtyard’s baby grand piano to match the sonorities of the Strad. The programme began with a romanticised rendition of the Adagio in G from Bach’s Cantata BWV 156. Then followed lighter-hearted pieces by Frank Bridge – his Scherzetto, which Lloyd Webber unearthed at the Royal College of Music – and Benjamin Britten. This intelligent juxtaposition illustrated convincingly the influence of master on pupil. The drawback was that we were only given two movements of Britten’s fascinating Sonata, doubtless to make room for a couple of mellifluous favourites: Fauré’s Élégie and Saint-Saens’ forever-gliding Swan. Preceding the Brahms, a local tribute was paid in a beautifully played, if questionable arrangement of one of Elgar’s Sea Pictures, followed by a meditative, vaguely Elgarian nocturne ‘In the half-light’ by Julian’s father William and an old-fashioned sentimental lullaby ‘A Song for Baba’ written by Julian himself. Sparks almost literally flew in the encore: De Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance.

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