Join our email list
“impeccable technique and natural musicality”~ Garth Wilshere ~ read full review
“a player of great musical maturity”~ John Button ~ read full review
“virtuosity and warm stage presence”~ Shona Thomson, Life Member, Southland ~ read full review
“I have always had a love for the violin and my dream as a youth was to become a concert violinist.”~ Michael Hill ~ read full review
“We were transfixed from [his] very first phrase.”~ William Dart ~ read full review
“A true natural, he plays with a deep passion and a personal voice that will carry him to the top of his field.”~ Ida Kavafian, violinist and teacher ~ read full review
7 July 2010
Josef Spacek (violin), Michael Houstoun (piano).
Music by Martinu, Janacek, Ysaye and Beethoven
Wellington Town Hall, July 5
Josef Spacek is a 23-year-old Czech violinist who won the 2009 Michael Hill International Violin Competition, and this concert was part of an extensive New Zealand tour that was part of his prize package.
The programme - one of two he offers on this tour - was a stimulating package that made as many musical demands as technical, and it revealed a player of great musical maturity. It helped, particularly in Beethoven's Sonata for Piano and Violin in C minor Op 30 No 2, that Spacek had as a partner Michael Houstoun, a pianist of great experience and distinction. Together they made this sonata very special, with the all-important piano part leading the violin through a journey that highlighted the varied qualities of this, one of the finest of Beethoven's 10 for this combination.
The two Czech sonatas that occupied the first half were a refreshingly unhackneyed choice and superbly complementary. Martinu was a prolific composer, and that has brought some confusion in the cataloguing of his works; his violin sonata from 1929 is the first he acknowledged, although there are at least two earlier violin sonatas. It is a jazz-inflected work, reflecting his time in Paris, but not on quite the level of some of his other works from that time. But Spacek played it in splendidly idiomatic style, backed with complete assurance by Houstoun.
The qualities of the elusively beautiful Janacek Violin Sonata composed about the time of Jenufa were wonderfully drawn out by Spacek and Houstoun. The six sonatas for solo violin by Eugene Ysaye are curious works, and they present the player with hair-raising problems, but in this performance of the last of them Spacek was completely at home, making light of any difficulties; as he was with the encore by Henri Vieuxtemps.
