Music / Avi Avital & Konstantin Shamray. At Llewellyn Hall, October 5. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

ISRAELI mandolinist Avi Avital is touring Australia for Musica Viva and had planned to work with Italian cellist Giovanni Sollima.

In the way of such things, covid interfered and Musiva Viva has had to scramble to find alternative accompanists. For this, and some other dates on the tour, Avital was joined by Adelaide-based pianist Konstantin Shamray with a program put together at short notice. Shamray is a very fine pianist, but just not restrained enough to effectively accompany a solo mandolin.

The concert opened with a suite of Eastern European folk dances arranged by Bela Bartok. For this first work the balance between mandolin and piano was fine, but this was followed by a Mozart Sonata in E minor, originally written for violin and piano. The similarity of percussive attack in the tone of both instruments, and more energetic playing from Shamray, meant that the mandolin simply disappeared under the right-hand notes of the piano.

Avital continued with a solo mandolin piece, written by the absent Sollima. This explored all the range of the mandolin with some spirited playing before Shamray returned for a duo instrumental take on Manuel de Falla’s”Seven Spanish Songs”. Again, a problem of balance and the intrinsic Spanishness of the melodies just got lost.

To follow this Avital played a solo arrangement of a Bulgarian dance tune, with a long, improvised introduction leading into a complex dance tune played across all four courses of the mandolin and then finished the concert with a suite of three Israeli dance tunes composed, and/or adapted from traditional music, in 1951 by a Jewish musician who had moved to Palestine in the ’30s. Here there was less piano and the balance much better.

An encore of an Israeli pop song about Tel Aviv finished a concert ,which was overall inventively programmed and of a very high standard, but just let down a little by the musicians not knowing each other well enough to find the balance between the instruments.

They might do well to think about using an electric piano combined with the subtle re-enforcement of Avital’s mandolin that was already on stage, anathema though that might be to classical audiences.

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