<<  -- 3 --  Lawrence Budmen    WORTHY OF THE MASTER

Bohorquez and Lin opened the concert with an authentic nineteenth century rarity -- Robert Schumann's Funf Stucke im Volkston Op 102. This five movement suite -- composed in 1849 -- transverses a variety of genres and musical idioms. Bohorquez and Lin found the gracious wit in the folk like opening movement Mit humor. The intense yearning of the second and third sections (Langsam and Nicht schnell) found expressive voice in Bohorquez's glorious cello tones. The wonderfully understated classicism of the musicians' realization of the Nicht zu rasch movement brought new life to the music. The unbridled, darkly ruminative passion of the Stark und markiert finale brought intense, exuberant playing from the Bohorquez-Lin duo. For his encore, Bohorquez offered a chestnut of the cello repertoire -- 'The Swan' from Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns. His performance was refreshingly unsentimental. Adopting a faster than usual tempo, Bohorquez played the vignette as one long soaring musical space rather than a series of broken musical paragraphs. The beautiful phrasing and singing line of Bohorquez's playing made this most familiar of cello pieces sound freshly minted, new, and alive!

Claudio Bohorquez is that rarity among young musicians -- a technically fluent, imaginative, patrician artist. (He is scheduled to return to Miami to perform Dvorak's great Cello Concerto with the New World Symphony under Hans Graf on 6 and 7 November 2004.) Every score he plays is infused with a uniquely personal interpretive stamp. An unforgettable evening of great music making!