ON reflection, I think the punning title for the RCS's lunchtime concert, featuring the music of Zoltan Kodaly, was a mistake.
It was a serious concert with just two works, and featured just two musicians, violinist Rachel Spencer and cellist Duncan Strachan. These two are among the finest players I have ever heard coming through the academy ranks, though Strachan did his first degree elsewhere and his Masters in Glasgow.
Spencer has played at every level of RCS operations, leading all of its orchestral ensembles and featuring as soloist in the heftiest of pieces. The two of them are superb players and, justifiably, their concert yesterday might simply have been billed as “Rachel Spencer and Duncan Strachan play Kodaly”.
The two young musicians tore into the Hungarian composer’s Duo for Violin and Cello with enthralling versatility and intensity, delivering Kodaly’s, brilliant, role-swapping exchanges with power, panache and a remarkable intimacy, especially in the magical, hushed moment in the first movement where the two voices subside, each in turn supporting the other with whispered pizzicato notes. They also coloured the music vividly, with a genuinely earthy quality and a liberated sense of melodic freedom which gave the performance its gypsy feel.
Spencer then left the hall and returned to hear Strachan in a performance of the Sonata for Solo Cello which, technically and musically, was a tour de force. Such was the genius of Kodaly’s cello writing that, as I have observed before of this piece, there’s a sleight-of-hand at work, creating the illusion that there is actually more than one instrument playing; it didn’t fool Duncan Strachan in his magnificently dark account.
HHHH
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