SHLOMO MINTZ Chamber Recital / Review

SHLOMO MINTZ Chamber Recital
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall
Wednesday (13 November 2019)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 15 November 2019 with the title "Unusual musical choices lead to patchy performance".

Russia-born Israeli violinist Shlomo Mintz is the Ong Teng Cheong Professor in Music for Yong Siew Toh Conservatory in the 2019/20 academic year. Also Distinguished Artist-in-Residence in last year’s Singapore International Violin Competition when he performed all six Eugene Ysaye unaccompanied Sonatas, his showcase this year was a chamber recital with faculty members of the Conservatory.

Unusually, the recital opened with Mintz on the viola, in two works which were not conceived for the instrument. The first was Schubert’s popular Arpeggione Sonata in A minor, originally written for the arpeggione, an obsolete six-stringed bowed instrument with frets. Nowadays, it is always heard played on the cello.  

Neither as deep nor mellow as the cello, the viola would struggle in comparison. Nevertheless Mintz maintained a firm and throaty singing tone throughout its Biedermeier gentility. However the tempos adopted by him and accompanying pianist Ge Xiaozhe in the opening movement were so broad that there seemed little differentiation in dynamics continuing into the actual slow movement.

Leisurely to some, and draggy to others, life seemed to be sucked out of the music. Moving from the early Romantic to the late Romantic, Brahms’ Viola Sonata in E flat major (Op.120 No.2, originally for the clarinet), there gained some semblance of vitality, not least in the central Allegro Appassionato movement. With fire in the belly, much credit went to Ge’s rock-steady partnership which did not stint on keyboard vigour.

Lighter music occupied the recital’s second half, now with Mintz playing the violin. Darius Milhaud’s surrealist ballet Le boeuf sur le toit, crafted as a cinema-fantasy for violin and piano, was a weird choice. The music was inspired by Brazilian dance rhythms, ragtime, cabaret and popular music hall idioms. Also throw in the Frenchman’s experiments with polytonality, meaning the instruments often played in different keys.

This sounded like some disaster, with excruciating off-pitch and approximate playing which became increasingly embarrassing by the minute. Perhaps all that was deliberate, given that the work’s absurdist title, named after an actual 1920s Parisian nightclub, means “ox on the roof”.   

Thankfully there was Astor Piazzolla’s tango suite The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires to save the day. Here Mintz was partnered with members from the Conservatory, namely Qian Zhou and He Shucong (violins), Zhang Manchin (viola), Ng Pei-Sian (cello) and Guennadi Mouzyka (double bass). They performed a string sextet arrangement by Fabian Bertero, which is shorter and less florid than the more often heard Leonid Desyatnikov version.

Here was a collective letting down of hair, with the infectiously rhythmic music being the tonic for the evening’s mixed fare. Mintz also seemed more in his element, wallowing in the high spirits and bittersweet asides. Opening with celebratory Summer and closing with vibrant Spring, the performance was loudly and rapturously received, with fugal Winter being encored to even more cheers.