With strings attached

By WILLIAM DART

Let's cut the Stradtalk and leave the Amati in safe storage. I doubt if any of the 18 semifinalists in the Second Michael Hill International Violin Competition had the luxury of such classy fiddles last weekend, but it didn't prevent them from coming up with some of the finest violin playing I've heard in years.

The only whiff of violinocracy came when Pierre Amoyal's Kochanski Stradivarius made a brief appearance at Friday night's Celebrity Concert, an occasion ignominious enough to bring a blush to the poor instrument's varnish. A play-as-you-are Mendelssohn D minor Trio by three musicians who should know better, as well as a string of speeches and a guest spot by the New Zealand Trio, hardly makes for a carnival atmosphere, let alone good value for a $55 ticket.

The rewards lay elsewhere. Why else would one endure the grim decor and public lavatory lighting of the Queenstown Memorial Hall if it wasn't to savour 15 different performances of Mozart's K 301, and no less than 18 takes on John Rimmer's The Dance of the Sibyl?

They talk tourism, fishing, late snow and skiing in the streets, but in the QMH, Paganini and Bach rule. And at the centre of it all is the beneficent Michael Hill, usually in the front row, living through each piece phrase by phrase.

And the New Zealand composer is not forgotten. The competition includes a specially commissioned work and Rimmer's Sibyl proves a rich canvas for players to explore and interpret. In the hands of the sad-eyed Marina Yakovleva it was a Slavic lament; the superlative Yvonne Lam, playing it from memory, evoked a sense of the mysterious.

The work provoked discussion. The youngest competitor, ShanShan Yao, told me how she had been taken into the woods by her host family so that she might understand the sonic landscape the composer was invoking. Judge Takako Nishizaki insisted that "music is sound, after all, and the piece makes the competitors come to terms with that".

One hundred and eight works (many of them full-scale sonatas) from 18 performers in three days is a big ask.

More than a few of us were commenting that it seemed a brutal chop from 18 semifinalists to the half-dozen that are taken up to Auckland later in the week.

Competitors have come from all over the world and, this time round, there are two New Zealanders, Natalia Lomeiko and Lara Hall.

Lomeiko gets through to the finals; Hall, joining the roster with a week's notice, plays two spirited sets and tells me the main appeal of the event is "giving us the chance to play 80 minutes of music".

Hall spent all Sunday practising. It's rare to find the competitors having the time and space to catch up with other performances. In fact, there are just a few audience members who last the distance from 10 till 10 each day. Many scribble cryptically in their programme at the end of each piece. Unaccompanied Bach is invariably a cruel test and the obligatory Paganini was also a thicket patch.

One of the few to face up to the Italian composer's diabolic demands was Yvonne Lam, who tossed off the 23rd Caprice with a smile on her face. Lam also found the music in Ysaye; most of her fellow colleagues made Ysaye's Ballade sound like a minor league Bartok on a bad day.

You can hear Lam in tonight's Honourable Awards Recital playing Rimmer and Prokofiev, along with fifth- and sixth-placegetters Alexandra Osborne and ShanShan Yao.

Other great performances remain in the memory of those who braved the rigours of the Queenstown Memorial Hall: Natalia Lomeiko's expansive Bach Chaconne, Nadezhda Korshakova's terrifying take on the Stalinist circus music of Prokofiev's Second Sonata, and Frenchman Naaman Sluchin's very Gallic and rather sexy way with Saint-Saens.

The suave Korean Eung Soo Kim played everything except the Rimmer from memory and with his pianist wife, Moon Young Chae, came up with the most winning ensemble of the weekend.

With the final only a day away, the words of American judge Chad Smith come back to haunt: these players, Smith asserted, are "the best and brightest of the next generation who will provide the definitive performance of works like the Brahms concerto".

And, in the Town Hall tomorrow evening, finalists Natalia Lomeiko will be offering the Brahms, German Korbinian Altenberger the Sibelius, while Australian Kristian Winther manages to pull us into the 1940s with the Shostakovich First.

Nineteen-year old Winther, a Queenstown favourite, is the ultimate in transtasman cool. His Bach Chaconne danced where others lumbered, his Saint-Saens was a snaky delight, and, after a moment's hesitation and a cocked eyebrow, he rounded off his Mozart sonata to the accompaniment of a descanting siren from the town's volunteer fire brigade.

I know I am not alone in my dismay that Yvonne Lam did not make it to the top three, and perhaps some of the judges are similarly surprised. And so they might be, considering the way each makes independent assessments without any cross-panel consultations. The concertos Lam offered were Prokofiev and Shostakovich - not the safe perennial favourites on most competitors' bill of fare. It would be distressing to think this may have been a factor.

Performance:


* The Michael Hill Honourable Awards Recital, Town Hall Concert Chamber, tonight 7.30


* The Michael Hill International Violin Competition Finals, Auckland Town Hall, tomorrow, 7.30pm