PETA STEWART
Opening the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra’s Autumn Symphony Season on May 31 2018 is Conrad van Alphen, one of South Africa’s most prominent musical exports. Van Alphen was born in South Africa, but is now based in The Netherlands, from where he runs his busy international career.
He is back to conduct the first two of the four-concert season, with soloists Antonio Pompa-Baldi performing the Resphigi Piano Concerto, and Nikita Boriso-Glebsky performing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto.
He’s looking forward to both: “I remember meeting Antonio several years ago at the JPO when we accompanied him in a lovely performance of Schumann’s piano concerto. It will be a pleasure to perform the less well known piano concerto of Respighi with him shortly.”
It’s not the first time he has accompanied Boriso-Glebsky – they have performed together in Russia and with Van Alphen’s Sinfonia Rotterdam before, as well as here in Cape Town where the performance was seen as one of the highlights of the year.
While here, Van Alphen will also conduct the UCT Symphony Orchestra at the Baxter Concert Hall on 24 May at 7.30pm with several young soloists – former CPYO principal cello Seul Pearl Jung, violist Uliana Alekseev, the daughter of CPO guest concertmaster Farida Bacharova and the late CTSO violist Oleg Alekseev, Bonolo Kgaile, who sometimes plays as an ad hoc violinist with the CPO and flautist Sakhile Humbane, who has himself played with the CPO.
‘Festival van Zeeuwsch Vlaanderen’
Since he was here last year, Van Alphen has had a busy year. He returned to Rotterdam to conduct his Sinfonia in the sold-out opening of the season of the 2200-seater concert hall De Doelen and then opened the Festival van Zeeuwsch Vlaanderen. This was where he discovered the benefits of friends, when his concertmaster had a sudden emergency and had to pull out he brought in fellow South African Ian van Rensburg, a friend and concertmaster with the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra in Denmark. You can see that even with a single rehearsal for balance, the Sinfonia and its substitute concertmaster played brilliantly and seamlessly in this live recording – watch below:
Then it was a packed winter season throughout Europe – the Enescu Philharmonic in Bucharest, the Macedonian Philharmonic and a grand Sinfonia Rotterdam Christmas program in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and the famous Cathedral in Den Bosch.
“The absolute highlights were my debuts at the Liceu in Barcelona at the end of December, and in January conducting an all Rachmaninov program with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra during three sold-out concerts in their magnificent Maison Symphonique. With temperatures in Canada way below zero and ample snow, I rounded off the trip in Mont Tremblant with a week of skiing, a passion I developed during my tenure as chief conductor in the Caucasus many years ago.”
A quick visit to the Brandenburger Symphoniker behind him, he is now looking forward to the six-week tour of his home country.
‘Beautiful programmes’
“What a delight it is to return to the Cape Town Philharmonic! We have long history together and without a doubt this lovely orchestra has played an important role in the development of my career. From the beginning of our collaboration in 2004 I agreed with the CPO’s artistic executive Sergei Burdukov that he would simply decide my repertoire.”
“I am very grateful to him for always offering me beautiful programmes, sometimes giving me the opportunity to further develop in a work which I have conducted many times before like the upcoming Pictures at an Exhibition of Mussorgsky. On other occasions, I have had to revisit a composition that I haven’t done for a long time or, one that is new to me, such as the upcoming Sibelius Symphony No 1, which I conducted so long ago that I am taking this opportunity to restudy it from scratch,” he adds.
On his return to Rotterdam at the end of June, he will go directly in preparation for Sinfonia Rotterdam’s open-air Sinfonia Maritiem Concert, followed immediately by his conducting two concerts in a festival in France. Then, Tchaikovsky’s First Symphony with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra MAV in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna… and so it goes.
Who: Conrad van Alphen, conductor
What: Cape Town Philharmonic’s Autumn Symphony Season
Where: Artscape Opera House
When: 31 May and 7 June 2018 20:00
Info, book: http://bit.ly/pompa-baldi/ http://bit.ly/boriso-glebsky
Web: www.cpo.org.za
WS
