This Special Spring Concert featured Amanda Forsyth, a remarkable award-winning Canadian cellist who made her Israeli debut.
By MAX STERNIsrael Sinfonietta
Doron Solomon,
Conductor
Amanda Forsyth, cello
This Special Spring Concert featured Amanda Forsyth, a remarkable award-winning Canadian cellist who made her Israeli debut. Not only is she gorgeous, but she plays the cello immaculately, and made an exciting impression.
The tone she draws from the cello is thick, heavy, powerful - almost like a contrabass. Yet Forsyth graced through the fiendishly difficult passages of Schumann's late Cello Concerto, Op. 129 with ease. Her sense of phrasing is sensitive, authoritative and conceived in relation to the overall structure of the work. This particular perfomance, though did not quite capture the work's soaring idealism.
Forsyth spent much of her youthful career as a chamber musician and principal orchestral player, and this is reflected in her approach - virtuosic without presumption, confident without showiness, bearing comparison to Anne Sofie Mutter and Ofra Harnoy. She frequently performs with her husband, renowned Israeli violinist-conductor Pinchas Zuckerman, who was in the audience this evening.
Other works on the program included Mendelssohn: Fingal's Cave Overture and Haydn's "Military" Symphony, No.100.