The thrill of a live classical music performance is here to stay

Daily Maverick

22-07-2025

Why still hear classical music live? What can a concert by your local orchestra offer, when there are more than 100 years of unsurpassable recordings available to listeners?
No less a towering giant than Glenn Gould considered live performances outdated and artistically inappropriate. He gave his last concert in 1964, and spent the next 20 years in recording studios, changing the way people listened to piano music.
No local musician could recreate what masters like this produced in studio conditions, so why go to hear them play those same pieces?
It was something I wondered myself as I trudged through Parktown, on the icy first night of the Johannesburg Philharmonic's Winter Symphony Season, to hear Grieg's Piano Concerto.
When I open my Idagio app, I can find 40 different recordings of the same piece within a few seconds, from Dinu Lipatti's poetic, intimate account with the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1947, to Leif Ove Andsnes's 2003 epic drama with the Berlin Philharmonic, which reaches a technical refinement that not even machines could reproduce.
What could a concertgoer hope to get out of a Joburg performance in 2025, with so much freshness and bravura available at their fingertips?
One resounding answer arrived in the person of Aleksandra Świgut, a 33-year-old Polish pianist with an enthralling stage presence. She showed up to play the Grieg looking like a conventional concert pianist, though what emerged from her playing was something quite unique.
She opened the concerto with the solid force that Grieg's A-minor chords demand (and that JPO listeners have come to expect, in the wake of Olga Kern). But her strength turned out to be just one bright shade in a broader spectrum.
Brawn gave way to a smooth elegance in the main theme, and eventually to a tender sensuousness in the romantic second theme. In between, there were so many sharp switches in touch, tone, timbre and articulation – like hairpin bends turning from one colour of the rainbow to the next – navigated with a thrilling virtuosic energy.
Call her a chameleon in combat boots.
What was perhaps an even rarer achievement was her total musical and dramatic integration with the ensemble. Many Romantic concertos are performed either as a contest between piano and orchestra, or to extol a shining hero among the duller masses.
Świgut carried off the impressive interpretive achievement of taking up a lead role while honouring a larger structure. Could it match the precision or intensity of the Grieg recordings on offer? It hardly matters, because it was unique, a performance that could not be replaced by any other. Here was an artist who brought both thought and passion to her work, and it crackled with energy as it came to life before an audience's rapt ears.
The soloist who appeared the following week – Andrey Gugnin (38), Russian – was no less dazzling in his technique, but his standout moment came after he had played his programmed work.
Rachmaninoff's First Piano Concerto is often heard in the shadow of his titanic Second and Third Concertos, but it glitters with something not found in its successors, a wonderful weirdness and youthful tension, where you can almost hear the composer forming his own voice in real time.
Gugnin discharged it with a poised athleticism, and then returned amid loud applause to play an encore, which turned out to be one of the highlights of an entire musical year.
His encore, Rachmaninoff's G-major Prelude, emerged with a tender intimacy that drew the entire hall inward. The melody unfolded tremulously, as if Gugnin himself didn't know what the next note might be. His right hand was light, with its notes shimmering over the Steinway's strings like sunlight on water, and his left hand gently and elegantly grounded the Prelude's lyricism.
A quiet radiance emanated from the stage throughout the hall, and the moment felt suspended out of time. For two and a half minutes, its tenuous enchantment brought present listeners closer to the deep heart's core. Recordings by even better pianists could not do that.
Some regular concertgoers may groan to see Beethoven on the programme. His symphonies are both intellectually and emotionally vibrant (they're classics for a reason), but are treated by many musicians with either a reverence or a torpor that deadens their spirit. Conrad van Alphen clearly is not one of those musicians.
The South African-born conductor, who led the third week of the season, has forged a successful career in Europe; listening to his guest appearances at the JPO, it's not difficult to see why.
His Pastoral Symphony (Beethoven's Sixth, in F major) blasted away all thoughts of cold fronts, winter winds and Joburg's general June jitters.
The first movement, which Beethoven titled 'Awakening of cheerful feelings on arrival in the countryside', was light and lucent. The first violins sailed through their melodies like a swallow soaring in springtime, and when the winds and French horns joined them the sound beamed from the stage with very cheerful feelings indeed.
In fact, a lot of Van Alphen's direction was marked by an irresistibly strong forward momentum and upward lift; or, put more bluntly, it was remarkably bright, loud and fast. Not in a roughshod way, but with long, flowing lines, and a warmer and more luminous energy than this reviewer has ever heard in the Pastoral Symphony.
The third movement, a 'Merry gathering of country folk', was a vivacious dance, and many listeners in the audience seemed to be bopping their heads along to the music. Van Alphen didn't rush mindlessly through it, but steered the orchestra effortlessly through shifts in tempo and volume to evoke a vibrant, three-dimensional setting.
The thunderstorm of the fourth movement was a rip-roaring force of nature, and when the sun came out again in the final movement, it was with a luster that sun-loving South Africans could wholeheartedly embrace. As the orchestra breezed through the last few minutes of the shepherd's grateful song, there seemed to be radiance arising and filling the hall.
For now, it seems that the JPO and its audiences will still have to do with only one concert per week, which can seem scant to many when they find that performances are sold out long in advance.
No Wednesday-night concerts are scheduled for next month's Early Spring Season either. But a gratifying appendage to the Winter Season was the JPO's accompaniment of Joburg Ballet's stunning production of Swan Lake, which opened at the Joburg Theatre and will soon travel to the Cape Town International Convention Centre.
Unsurprisingly, the orchestra dazzled the audience on the night I attended. Note mistakes aside, they played with a sharp, snappy energy that kept the drama humming from each moment to the next, and a sprightly, buoyant sound that seemed to lift the dancers onstage.
Particularly noteworthy is Johan Ferreira, the principal oboist, who had to carry the famous theme many times throughout the performance, as well as the concertmaster Miro Chakaryan and principal cellist Susan Mouton, who accompanied Siegfried and Odette in their moving pas de deux.
I also especially enjoyed trumpeter Donald Bower's jovial solo in the Neapolitan Dance. The conductor, Eddie Clayton, welcomed a resounding applause for the players in the pit at the end of the show, securing the irreplaceable sense of joyful communion and spontaneous energy that brings a packed theatre together.
Recordings have their beauty, but the thrill of a live performance is certainly here to stay. DM