Music / Northern Lights, Johan Dalene, violin; Jennifer Marten-Smith, piano. At Llewellyn Hall, June 12. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

Musica Viva served up a seven-course banquet of exquisite music at Llewellyn Hall on Thursday night as Scandinavian violinist Johan Dalene took the stage with Tasmanian pianist Jennifer Marten-Smith to perform a mix of romantic classics, pictorial Scandinavian works and one new piece.

At only 24 years of age, Dalene performed throughout with supreme confidence and ease, making eye contact with the audience and twice picking up the microphone to explain the repertoire.

In a concert aimed to satisfy, three of the compositions were substantial works by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Grieg, but interspersed with tiny gems from the violin-piano repertoire before the electrifying finale violin showpiece, Tzigane by Ravel.

The opening Sonata No. 8 in G Major by Beethoven began breathtakingly fast and light with allegro assai movement but the work also revealed almost waltz-like lilts and gave way to more expansive moments which showed the beauty of the 1725 Stradivarius Dalene plays on.

In Tchaikovsky’s Memory of a Beloved Place, the duo worked in perfect emotional harmony as the piece moved from reflection to the lighter scherzo then into the final movement, Melodie.

After interval, we heard yet another work in in G Major, Grieg’s Sonata No. 2, a piece in three contrasting movements that owes much to the composer’s discovery of traditional Norwegian folk dance and music. After the first movement, spontaneous applause erupted.

But it was, to my mind, the tiny tastes of music in between the main courses that made this musical feast so special.

Most notable of these was Tilted Scales, newly-commissioned by Musica Viva for these two performers from young Australian-Jack Frerer, who now lives and works in New York as a composition lecturer at Rutgers University.

Described as “chaotic” by Dalene, Tilted Scales nonetheless explores through harmonic effects and work at the high end of the violin, the “balance” always needed by artists in a violin-piano duo. It was proved a balancing act indeed as pianist and violinist, sometimes intersecting when they found the musical fulcrum, but sometimes deliberately not.

Obviously fun to do, the piece concluded with a joyous, loud Bonk!

Another tiny taster was A Spring Morning by Lili Boulanger, one of the great musical talents lost during World War I. Written in 1917, a year before her death, this work contrary to what might have been expected, probed to be a lively, powerfully life-affirming piece.

We next heard Nocturne for Violin, written by Finnish composer Rautavaara in 1993. Slow, quiet and pictorial, it summoned up the impression of a freezing evening in Finland. This was a high point of the night, showing both performers at their most delicate.

After an almost terrifying performance of the Ravel, which begins with a long cadenza so long that one feared the pianist would never come in – she did – Dalene and Marten-Smith returned to the stage to perform a gentle lullaby by another Scandinavian, Sibelius, to send us home to rest.