News Archive

Lyndelle Lawrence
Public relations editorial intern
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia

A skilled presentation of finger work on strings and keys impressed an Evensong audience at Avondale College Seventh-day Adventist Church this past Saturday (June 6). The program featured Dr Sohyun Eastham on violin and Avondale College student Melissa Rogers on piano.

The unison notes of violin and piano during Mozart's Sonata in E minor marked the beginning of the Sohyun's performance. Together with accompanist Helen Smith, Sohyun played the first and second movements with heightened sensitivity. However, during Brahms' Scherzo, Sohyun played up high on her violin while Helen played big chords and octaves on the piano. The piece was highly dramatic and rhythmically driven, but it also featured gentler, flowing sections. The violin and piano appeared to "converse" with one other during another Brahms piece, Sonata in D minor. The theme passed repeatedly from the former to the latter and back again. The free-flowing structure, highly contrasting moods, colour and tonality of Sohyun's final piece, the rhapsodic Tzigane by Ravel, best highlighted her skills. She began unaccompanied, her solo reminiscent of Gypsy melodies. Later she executed double stops, octaves, high notes, harmonics and left- and right-hand pizzicato. When the piano joined, the audience were treated to unconventional harmony, dissonance and uncommon modulations and resolutions of chords.

Melissa began with Beethoven's Sonata in E flat major. The second movement, L'Absence, evoked emotions of emptiness and longing and ended without returning to the home key. It segued into the third movement, Le Retour, with a big chord exclamation and conveyed a livelier, happier nature that seemed to provide a resolution to the previous movement. Melissa performed three short pieces ("About strange lands and people," "Reverie" and "The poet speaks") from Schumann's Scenes from childhood before her finale, "Les jeux d'eaux la villa d'este" by Liszt. Its broken chords and rapid arpeggiation on the higher register of the piano conjured the gentle spouts of a fountain, the flow and ebb of clear water.