In the Ghent café and concert salon De Afkikker you can't quit, but you can listen to intimate chamber music concerts. In a previous review I wrote about Salon De Graaf, this salon is even smaller and more intimate.
With forty listeners it's full. Hostess Rita De Vuyst is a jack-of-all-trades who organizes all concerts, introduces them, stands behind the bar etc. De Afkikker is located right near the Blandijn, in the middle of the student district. With her boundless energy and contagious enthusiasm, she has been attracting not only students but also a broader audience for forty years. In the early years there was funk, fusion and jazz. Over the last twenty years there is increasingly classical music on the menu.
On the occasion of International Women's Day on March 8, violist Axel Bral and pianist Katrijn Friant perform a program with only female composers such as Pauline Viardot-García, with which the program opened. She was friends with Chopin. You hear that in her music, as well as her Spanish and gypsy heritage. She wrote many songs and works for piano and violin. At eighty-three she still wrote an opera. The lyrical, sentimental pieces we hear are dedicated to her son and violist Paul.
Lera Auerbach
How many of you know Lera Auerbach? I didn't, until today, but for me she is the revelation of this program. This fifty-year-old Russian pianist and composer moved to New York at seventeen to study at the Juilliard School. A multitalent, she also writes poetry, draws and paints. She now tours the world and is, besides in New York, especially active in London and Vienna.
She started playing piano at age four, at age twelve she already composed her first opera. Later she composed another opera: The Blind based on a text by Maeterlinck, in which not only the singers but also the audience are blindfolded. She wrote a requiem on Russian texts by Mandelstam, Blok, Brodsky and Akhmatova. Sometimes simple, meditative, sometimes wild, fierce, always moving, music that grabs you by the scruff of the neck. Lera Auerbach: a name to remember and cherish.
Solid and brilliant
After the intermission, in which Rita serves everyone with her five arms, Axel and Katrijn continue with a sonata by the third composer of the evening, French Melanie Bonis (1858-1937). Impressionism with a touch of exoticism, playful and often melancholic.
How happy I am to see and hear you again, I said afterwards to pianist Katrijn Friant. It was thirty years ago, when she often performed in the then legendary concert room De Rode Pomp. Friant plays brilliantly, as she did thirty years ago. Violist Axel Bral, who also holds a doctorate as a civil engineer, plays very solidly. It might perhaps be a bit more expressive, sometimes he could get more out of his instrument, I think. Maybe he plays like an engineer.
Would you like to attend a concert in this intimate salon? On April 14, Polish baritone Artur Rožek sings songs by Ravel, Poulenc and Brahms with pianist Martijn Van Sas. Rožek is a blind singer who has been a guest at the Afkikker several times before.
- WHAT: Female composers: Pauline Viardot-García, Lera Auerbach, Melanie Bonis
- WHO: violist Axel Bral and pianist Katrijn Friant
- WHERE & WHEN: March 10, 2024, De Afkikker, Gent
- PHOTO: © WE/KC