Dashwood Piano Competition
“A sense of the joy and fun of music-making” was the most striking quality present in the playing of all Cranleigh pianists who featured in the Dashwood Piano Competition on Friday May 2nd, said adjudicator Ruth Harte MBE. Mrs Harte spoke warmly of the fact that young musicians at Cranleigh clearly had a pride in their art and had a clear awareness of the importance of enjoying one’s own performance in order to communicate effectively with an audience. She spoke about the need to develop the admirable skill of creating an orchestral sound palette on the piano in order to provide colourful and
cantabile music-making on what is, in effect, a very percussive instrument. Ruth’s startlingly beautiful performance of the first ‘scene’, ‘Of Foreign Lands and Peoples’, from
Kinderszenen by Robert Schumann was an apposite illustration of all the qualities she discussed in which she relished the richness of the central left hand melody in particular, and communicated her own precepts of pianistic technique in “pedalling with your ears”.
A number of pupils gave very accomplished performances of their chosen works which were admirably musically mature for the tender age of the performers. Oliver Pike gave a confident and exciting rendition of Franz Schubert’s Impromptu in A flat, particularly in the opulent middle section in which there was a genuine mood of pathos in the lyrical right hand melody accompanied by dark, full-bodied, ‘orchestral’ repeated chords in the left hand. Similarly, Paul Gallagher engaged his audience skilfully with his visible enjoyment the music’s rhetorical gesture in Schumann’s Traumerei.
Claude Debussy is a favourite composer amongst Cranleigh piano students and this was confirmed by the fact that three of his most exquisite pieces featured in the competition. Chloe Allison gave a commendably assured account of the technically demanding Arabesque No. 1 in which she transported the audience into a wholly appropriate impressionistic sound world in which the rippling triplet figures flowed with dreamy placidity.
Alex Grifith’s performance of ‘In Smyrne’, a little-known work by Edward Elgar, was extremely well controlled, particularly in his very lyrical playing of the left hand melody against a complex oscillating figure in the right hand. He also revealed a striking ability to take his audience on a pastoral journey by revealing a genuine poetic affinity with Elgar’s music. Giles Rozier-Pamplin gave a very clean and creditably stylistic performance of the first movement of Muzio Clementi’s Sonata in G and played with youthful energy and excellent stylistic awareness. Freddie Hickman provided a forthright, though richly musical, account of Franz Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3 whilst Sam McCagherty brought the audience close to waltzing round the recital hall in his fittingly playful and carefree performance of Auguste Durand’s First Waltz, and was awarded the audience prize as a result.
Ruth Harte awarded first and second prizes in the junior category to Carole Date Chong and Lizzie Wait respectively and praised the lively contrasts and easy lilt in Carole’s playing of Clementi’s Allegro con spirito whilst acknowledging the fact that she felt that she was being spiritually taken to Spain in Lizzie’s idiosyncratic and well-balanced playing of Mike Cornick’s Espagnol. Jocelyn Waller and Tom Chevis were then awarded first and second place respectively in the senior round. Ruth explained that Jocelyn “drew me into the performance before she started” and that “the music enfolded with persuasiveness”. Indeed, Jocelyn showed consummate ability in making a poetic tessellation of pianistic sonorities through the shimmering and rhapsodic qualities which are so central to Debussy’s Ballade. Tom Chevis’s performance of Felix Mendelssohn’s Prelude and Fugue in D, with its Romantic fullness of texture and Bachian energy, was commended for its tasteful variation and for Tom’s intelligent approach to the contrapuntal writing which was pleasantly well balanced.
Both performers and audience were charmed by Ruth Harte’s warmth and sincerity and by her words of wisdom directed at young musicians, inspiring them to strive to take control of an audience, to perform beautifully at all times and, above all, to take pride and to enjoy making music.
TPM
Published
06 May 2008
- Category
Music
Back