Zoë Knighton and Amir Farid
45 Downstairs, Flinders Lane, Melbourne
5 March 2014
Persons such as me with certain disabilities go pale at the
two flights of stairs down to the concert space of 45 Downstairs: roughly as
steep as the final ascent of Everest without the snow. Andy admits the vertiginously
challenged through Tradesperson’s Entrance from a lane off a lane off Flinders
Street. The 1900s style warehouse is of ancient brick, wobbly glass, steel
beams and a beautifully solid old Baltic pine floor. The architectural features
conspire to make the space acoustically it’s superb and it loves cello-ish
sounds. It loves cellos. It love pianos.
45 is one of the five-year old Knighton-Farid Duo’s homes
and they were obviously happy there on Wednesday night. So was the audience –
glass of chardy in hand.
The recital was part of Mary-Lou Jelbart’s Festival of Words
and Music. The music bit on Wednesday was K & F’s continuum of French to
Argentinian – and back again – music. The program notes promised ‘sumptuous
romanticism’. K & F delivered without a hint of soup. Their secret was
judicious use of rubato: just enough
to deliver romanticism but not so much as to cloy or interrupt the march of the
music. That secret made the program opener, Debussy (Claire de Lune) new all over again and it continued – via Bragato
and Solare – through the rare and beautiful Huré sonata and the equally rare
Nadia Boulanger pieces back to Debussy. The Italian José Bragato was Piazolla’s
cellist and Piazolla was Boulanger’s student so the transition from 20th
century French music to Argentina was fixed. Clever programming and it worked
superbly: the duo is very much at home in Argentina.
Huré's 1929 cello sonata could easily have been cello
with piano accompaniment. Huré was an organist by trade – and a contemporary of
Widor – so he knew about multiple levels of harmony. K & F knew about that
idea too. We heard, by turns, bitter and sweet, longing and yearning. Huré wasn’t
Jewsh but the ghosts of the Jewish rag traders in the warehouse came out to
listen.
Boulanger’s three pieces had piquant transitions of harmony
from major to minor and back again and back again. The Duo used these to
produce superb emotional arcs that found Boulanger’s witty, acerbic and
assertive ideas. There were hints of Argentina, too I think … possibly … and I
imagined the pair each with a red rose, tango-like, in teeth, behind an ear, in
the hair.
For me, though, they
absolutely shone in Debussy’s late cello sonata with its hints of the 1910-ish The Girl with the Flaxen Hair and The Engulfed Cathedral. Not
surprisingly, the piece is considered technically demanding but there were no
hints of that with this pair. Their technical mastery and superb musicianship
were clear.
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