Nineteen-year-old Avigail Bushakovitz, born in Jerusalem and now living in South Africa and studying in Cape Town, scored a resounding success when she played Saint-Saens’s Violin Concerto No 3 in B minor with the KZN Philharmonic Orchestra.

As a violinist, she has a technical skill and musical insight beyond her tender years. This concerto, written in 1880, is not particularly well known except for the slow movement, a kind of barcarolle or Venetian gondola song, but Avigail’s poised performance was greatly to the liking of the Durban City Hall audience.

She produced a lovely sweet tone in the work’s many lyrical passages and had no problem at all with the technical demands of high-pitched flourishes and rapid repeated notes. And she has a calm and relaxed stage presence.

At the end there was prolonged applause, not only from the audience but from the orchestra players themselves, and in response she played an encore, one of Paganini’s Caprices.

Having said that, one must concede that the high point of the evening was unquestionably the orchestra’s performance of Dvorak’s Symphony No 8 in G major. This wonderful work is one on the finest in the entire symphonic repertory, with its endless flow of melody, brilliant orchestration and generally positive, cheerful atmosphere.

The visiting Swiss conductor Emmanuel Siffert took the players deftly through the many subtleties and beauties of Dvorak’s score. The brass were too dominant once or twice in the first movement but, that apart, the tonal balance was excellent and the playing all round was excellent (as a former orchestra player, Dvorak the composer made sure that every instrument had a fair chance). A lovely performance of a lovely symphony.

The concert opened with the overture to Mendelssohn’s early operetta Return from Abroad. Pleasant and unremarkable. - Michael Green