Review: Ashley Brown and Michael Houstoun at Raye Freedman Arts Centre

Michael Houstoun and Ashley Brown have few equals as a team. File photo / Wairarapa Times-Age

The capacity audience at Epsom's Raye Freedman Arts Centre on Saturday had obviously been unable to resist the lure of two of the country's finest musicians in repertoire rarely heard in the concert hall.

Ashley Brown and pianist Michael Houstoun have few equals as a team. Brown still has the dashing good looks and easy musicianship many remember from his days on the competition circuit; Houstoun, a formidable young talent in his time, is now one of our pre-eminent musical statesmen.

The pair offered remarkable insights into Beethoven's final two Cello Sonatas. Back in 1815, the composer's contemporaries were puzzled by the sparse textures and emotional economy of these scores; Brown and Houstoun took these very qualities as a challenge.

The opening Andante of the first sonata, delivered with just the right measure of dolce and cantabile, ushered in a crisply considered Allegro vivace that brought forth some remarkable colours in its development section.

After an Adagio of telling spaciousness, Brown and Houstoun relaxed in the sheer unpredictability of the Finale, with snappy Hungarian-style rhythms and folkish drones.

A bristling sense of dialogue characterised the opening movement of the Second Sonata while the final resolution of its central Adagio con molto sentimento d'affetto did full justice to the almost divine simplicity of Beethoven's language.

The utter capriciousness of the final Allegro fugato was inevitable from the moment when Brown gave us a playful hint of a theme about to be launched.

After interval it seemed as if an encore was being proffered mid-concert. Faure's Elegy set Brown's cello blooming with a rich vibrant tone against Houstoun's evocative accompaniment.

The evening closed with Rachmaninov's G minor Sonata, a work overflowing with Slavic passions, written to celebrate its composer's coming out of a life-threatening depression.

Houstoun acquitted himself magnificently in a terrifyingly virtuoso piano part and, even if the hall acoustics did not quite liberate the pizzicato fury of the work's galvanic Scherzo, Brown's full-blooded lyricism proved an irresistible force, especially in the songful Andante.