Brilliant celebration of repertoire

Two of Dunedin's retired professional musicians gave an excellent recital in a well-filled Knox Church yesterday afternoon.

Sydney Manowitz (violin) and Donald Cullington (piano) are both well into their senior citizen years, but their performance yesterday was refreshingly youthful, with an air of total dedication, as they worked their way through a marathon of five from the 26 sonatas written for violin and keyboard by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Opening with Sonata in D Major K7, written when Mozart was 8, the pair immediately settled into a stylistic presentation, with precise ornamentation and emphasising the molto of the first movement (allegro molto). One of the most beautiful passages of the programme came in the G major adagio of this sonata.

K379 in G Major (1781), while understandably more complex, remained stylistically Mozartian, with light scalic runs, well-defined subjects and was accorded impressive nuance while resisting overly enthusiastic climaxes or traces of rubato in the five variations.

After the interval, Cullington played Minuet in F, K2, written when the composer was 6, and standard repertoire for aspiring young pianists and junior exam candidates ever since. Then K304, with its strong unison octaves and moods of agitation and tension, demonstrated the maturing composer. Yesterday's performers adhered to style, resisting submission to sentimentality, especially in the second movement.

K305 allowed for a considerable display of instrumental virtuosity, and the high-spirited first and last movements of K308 (1781) were further evidence of Mozart's advancing skills in composition.

Yesterday's brilliant celebration of Mozart's repertoire was the first of two by Manowitz and Cullington. Their second recital will be next Sunday.

-By Elizabeth Bouman

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