MUSIC RECITAL:
Duo International de Paris: Liesl Stoltz (flute) and Kyoko Motono (piano).
Presented by the P.E. Music Society in collaboration with Alliance Française. In the Opera House. Some years ago we became acquainted here, at the annual music competition for high school learners, with Liesl Stoltz’s exceptional talent as a flautist.
After her time with Eva Tamassy in Stellenbosch, she studied under various grand masters such as Shigenori Kudo and Pierre-Ives Artaud in Paris, but also regularly in Italy under the world’s greatest, the Swiss Peter-Lukas Graf.
In the Opera House the audience could fully enjoy flute playing of the highest quality. Together with the Kyoko Motono of Japan, who has already established herself as a pianist in Paris, the two members of the duo gave a brilliant recital. The duo performs in every way on a high professional level, individually, but always as a unified ensemble. Only now and again in some of the pieces the sound balance swung slightly against the flute. However, with a tightly closed lid some of the important sonorities of the piano would have been lost. Three romances, opus 94 by Schumann, began the evening with great feeling, and already the rich tones flowed freely across the footlights, tones that Stoltz constantly draws magically and apparently effortlessly from her Muramatsu flute.
Beautifully balanced: The flute tone was firmly focused throughout the evening, without ever becoming strained. All the registers were perfectly balanced, the lower tones indeed exceptionally enviable.
She uses her vibrato purposefully as an ornament, never as a mere mannerism. Fauré’s Morceau de Concours is one of those gracious works for flute in which every sound comes warmly across, with a breath system and embouchure that play lovingly together, with accompaniment that reminds one of a serenely progressing basso continuo. In his Fantasy opus 79, tongue and fingers were in addition to this also willing slaves. Naturally, Paganini composed his unaccompanied Caprices for violin virtuosi fond of showing off, but many of these pieces lend themselves to performance on a flute. In the No. 4 opus 1 everything must necessarily be well integrated for it to sound like music, and it did.
Hard work: Dutilleux’s Sonatina (1945) is pure fun, if one can play it, but even with a flautistically acute and ready technique it demands a lot of hard work.
This was, however, no problem. The duo Stoltz-Motono played it stylishly with the greatest of ease. After the interval, adaptations of Debussy’s La fille aux cheveux de lin and the equally well known Clair de Lune were a wealth of sound. This was followed still more passionately and certainly pyrotechnically by Henri Busser’s Andalucia opus 86 with its extensive solo cadenza. The notes so brilliantly composed by Stefans Grové in “Pan and the Nightingale” (for unaccompanied flute) were transformed magnificently and with much fantasy into sound, and this more than fulfilled the composer’s wishes.
Choice of tempo exactly right: Then followed the Poulenc Sonata (1957), undoubtedly one of the most-loved French works composed in that century for flute and piano.
The two parts are integrated in an exceptionally inspired way, and the whole can be immediately appreciated by all. With the choice of tempo so exactly right (some performers choose a very hurried tempo), every moment was enjoyable. Stoltz has the necessary vitality to make her playing really come alive. Her accompanist kept pace very well.
Bizet’s Fantasie sur Carmen was an effectively dramatic and melodramatic ending, and after well-deserved applause, Intermezzo, also from Carmen was a suitable encore.
I am confident that Liesl Stoltz’s name in the world of flute playing will, with her growing repertoire and depth, become ever more widely known.
(Theo Boekkooi)