HUMBLE BEGINNINGS / THE FOUR SEASONS WITH CHLOE CHUA / Review

HUMBLE BEGINNINGS

T’ang Quartet

Victoria Concert Hall

Friday (22 April 2022)

 

THE FOUR SEASONS

WITH CHLOE CHUA

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Saturday (23 April 2022)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 27 April 2022 with the title "T'ang Quartet, Chloe Chua dazzle in weekend of strings".

 

Thirty years ago, four men in their twenties burst onto the local musical scene. Raising eyebrows and turning heads with an in-your-face attitude and style, they were admired and adored by the chic hipster demographic for their edgy and passionate performances. Formed by violinists Ng Yu-Ying and Ang Chek Meng, violist Lionel Tan and cellist Leslie Tan, they were the T’ang Quartet, Singapore’s first full-time professional chamber group. Chamber music, often considered staid and all-too-serious, was never to be the same again.

 

Today, the Tan brothers have retired from quartet-playing, replaced by younger colleagues violist Han Oh and cellist Wang Zihao. The quartet’s new incarnation made its debut with contrasting string quartets by Joseph Haydn and Alexander Borodin to no less fanfare. For Haydn’s Quartet in D minor (Op.76 No.2), nicknamed Fifths because of the descending interval that opened its first movement, the foursome was a model of decorum and discipline. With tightly-knit ensemble work, genuine tension was raised in the fast outer movements, but never in expense of clarity or warmth.

 

In Borodin’s familiar Second String Quartet (well-known as the Broadway musical Kismet had borrowed its melodies), there was more room to luxuriate. By playing its third movement’s radiant Notturno straight and without gilding the edges, sheer beauty was amply brought out. Judging by cheers and long line for autographs, some things for the rebooted T’ang Quartet have not changed.  

A long line to meet and greet the T'ang Quartet.
What else is new?

 

In 2018, an 11-year-old Chloe Chua made the headlines by sharing first prize in the Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition (Junior division). She enchanted international audiences with a highly assured yet sensitive performance of Winter from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Now 15, she has recorded a CD of all the Seasons with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and this concert was its live showcase.

 

While commanding the stage like a seasoned veteran, she retains an innocent girlish charm that would melt the stoniest of hearts. For her, it is no longer a matter of playing right notes, but one of making music with a spontaneity that comes as naturally as breathing. In tutti sections, she blended as one with the orchestra, then emerging with a solo voice that could only be described as sheer poetry.

 

Whether imitating bird songs, torrential rain storms, hunting horns or falling snow, she was fully absorbed with every measure and turn of phrase. Who could fault the audience for applauding after each season and every fast movement, just to catch her winsome smile?

 

The ante was upped in Pietro Locatelli’s Violin Concerto in D major (Op.3 No.12), also known as the Harmonic Labyrinth. Longer than any of the Seasons, its outer movements culminated with capriccios, the most fiendishly difficult of solo passages. Literally a compendium of contemporary virtuoso playing, Chloe took these in her stride, fearlessly letting rip and then some. Should a history of string-playing in Singapore be written in some distant future, surely T’ang Quartet and Chloe Chua would count among its highest lights.

    

Chloe Chua / SSO photos by Nathaniel Lim, courtesy of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.

THANK YOU, PROFESSOR THOMAS HECHT

THANK YOU, 

PROFESSOR THOMAS HECHT

 

On Saturday 16 April, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall was packed to the rafters to witness a moving event, a concert that marked the farewell of Professor Thomas Hecht, Head of Piano Studies, retiring after 19 years of faithful service to the Singapore classical music community. A native of Baltimore, Maryland, he was a former student and teaching assistant of the great American pianist Leon Fleisher. He arrived in Singapore in 2003 as a founding member of the Conservatory faculty and its first head of piano. Later, he also became the National University of Singapore’s first full professor of music.

 

His students, who came from all over the planet to study with him, reads like a Who’s Who of piano performance in Singapore. Names like Abigail Sin, Azariah Tan, Clarence Lee, Jonathan Shin, Mervyn Lee, Khoo Hui Ling and Serene Koh, many of whom became prizewinners in national and international piano competitions. More recently, his Taiwanese student Chang Yun Hua was invited to perform at the 2021 Singapore International Piano Festival. His students remember him for his keen intellect, holistic approach, nurturing spirit, infinite patience and kindness. The archetypal short-tempered and knuckle-rapping pedagogue he was certainly not. One of them, now a well-known musical personality, said, “he did not just teach playing, but imparted musical and life values in the most generous way possible. I would not be a professional musician today if not for him.”  

With his colleagues, 
Qian Zhou and Qin Li-Wei,
heads of violin and cello respectively.

 

Thomas performed concertos regularly, including those of Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Mozart and Ravel with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Conservatory Orchestra and Orchestra of the Music Makers. Notably, he also gave the Singapore premieres of Poulenc’s Aubade, Thomas Ades’ Concerto Conciso, Bruch’s Double Piano Concerto (with his colleague Albert Tiu), and piano quintets by Anton Webern and Alfred Schnittke, not to mention works of a host of American composers.

 

For the farewell concert, sporting a Chinese outfit, red scarf and a Bashkirovian goatee, he performed Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.24 in C minor (K.491) with the Conservatory Orchestral Institute conducted by Jason Lai. This was a reading of great poetry and sensitivity, contrasted with the sturm und drang of main theme and orchestral accompaniment. He played his own cadenzas, including a suitably grand and blustery but totally idiomatic one for the first movement. In the romance-like slow movement, his added personal touches in various passages helped enhance the narrative. 

A standing ovation greeted the Theme and Variations finale, and his encore was the poignant central movement of Rachmaninov’s Second Sonata. The video tribute by his colleagues and students was a truly touching one, and one can imagine Thomas staving off the tears for as long as possible after that.

You can view the full concert here:

Orchestral Institute: Thomas Hecht Plays Mozart (16 Apr 2022) | YST Conservatory - YouTube

 

Nineteen years seems like a long time, but it passed like a flash. Imagine the number of music students who have passed through the doors of YST, to become excellent performers and teachers themselves, to create and recreate great music all around the world. The legacy of spreading classical music globally, to make our wretched earth a better place to live in, is the purview of great teachers of music and life. We thank you, Professor Thomas Hecht, for making all this possible. We wish you the best in all your future endeavours.

YORE & YONDER / Red Dot Baroque

YORE & YONDER

Red Dot Baroque

The Arts House Chamber

Sunday (17 April 2022)

 

About ten years ago when I was giving a talk at one of the local music education institutions, a bright student asked me whether a period instrument group might come forth from the Singapore musical scene. My answer was certain: there was bound to be a musician or bunch of musicians interested in early music performance, who would pursue studies in specialist centres overseas and return to form such a group here. Just wait, and results will be seen in time.

 

Forward some ten years, that musician would be young violinist Alan Choo, and the group he formed was Red Dot Baroque (RDB). It gave its first concert at Esplanade Recital Studio in August 2018 to much acclaim and praise. In January 2019, RDB helped launch SingBaroque, the movement to make baroque music popular and mainstream in Singapore, by performing in a marquee event at CHIJMES. Also an ensemble-in-residence at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music, the future looked rosy indeed.

 

The Covid-19 pandemic that swept the world in 2020 could have killed the young ensemble’s hopes and aspirations, but RDB persevered by producing excellent digital concerts for an Internet audience, and later picked up on live events when it was socially safe to do so. Within all of this, Alan Choo shuttled between Singapore and the United States of America, where he was   concertmaster at the Grammy-winning period instrument group Apollo’s Fire based in Cleveland, Ohio. Choo had moved on from playing Franck, Hindemith and Khachaturian to the likes of Biber, Vivaldi, Locatelli and Frescobaldi, while Singapore now proudly boasts of its first and only professional period instrument ensemble.

 

This very enjoyable 75-minute long concert was a “Thank You” and fundraising event for Red Dot Baroque’s supporters through these few heady years, with a selection of performances from defining past concerts, which would constitute a perfect “Greatest Hits” sampler. The following photographs amply illustrate that Red Dot Baroque has a wider repertoire than the just Brandenburg Concertos, Four Seasons or Messiah, but so much more.

The concert began in total darkness with cellist
Leslie Tan playing, later joined by the other members
of RDB until the whole band assembled to
improvise on the old English tune Paul's Steeple. 

The Vivace movement from J.S.Bach's
Trio Sonata in D minor.

The Cantabile movement from
Vivaldi's Flute Concerto "Il Gardellino"
with flautist Rachel Ho.

Two Christmas carols, or Noels,
by Marc-Antoine Charpentier gave
the proceedings a festive flavour.

Whoever thought that local Malay folksong
Chan Mali Chan (arranged by Edmund Song)
could sound baroque?

Soprano Joyce Lee Tung joins RDB in
Tornami a vagheggiar from Handel's Alcina.

The RDB string quartet plays the finale
from Haydn's Joke Quartet, and the audience fell
for his joke, by applauding before the work ended.

 

A perennial favourite, Summer from
Vivaldi's Four Seasons, with Gabriel Lee as soloist.

A spot of dramatics, involving a lovelorn
Gabriel Lee with actress Rachel Ho.

Something happy Se l'aura spira
by Girolamo Frescobaldi.

A joyous end to the sparkling concert.

Take a bow, Red Dot Baroque!

 

Here’s to many more good years for Red Dot Baroque. One thing is certain: in a further ten years’ time, RDB will not be the only period instrument group in Singapore. But it will always be the first one. 

MIROIRS / HYEJIN KIM, Piano / Review

MIROIRS

Hyejin Kim, Piano

Navona Records 6383 / TT: 78’11”

 

It is always interesting to ponder on the career of a young pianist whom one has heard in the past. It may have been in a concert or piano competition, and one wondered whatever happened to that artist over the years. I first encountered the young South Korean pianist Hyejin Kim at the 2008 Hong Kong International Piano Competition where she won the fourth prize, and had described her as “one possessed with the greatest of confidence” and a “genuinely individual and creative personality”. Her latest recital disc confirms the high opinions (and expectations) I had of her at the time, and reassures me that true artistry does not fade but gets better with time.  

 

Her recital opens with the five pieces of Maurice Ravel’s Miroirs (Mirrors), impressionist masterpiece contemporaneous with Debussy’s Images, and even preceding the books of Preludes. Noctuelles (Night Moths) and Oiseaux tristes (Sad Birds) are possessed with an indelible sense of colour and shade, aided by precise articulation and excellent control of pedalling. This continues into Une barque sur l’ocean (A Boat on the Ocean), where lapping waves gradually build up to tremendous swells, resembling the famous Hokusai print. Had Ravel used that to illustrate the cover page of Miroirs, rather than Debussy in La Mer, no one would have blinked.

 

Not a bad cover design 
for Ravel's Miroirs?

The well-known Alborada del gracioso (Morning Song of the Jester) was alive with the rhythmic clatter of castanets and Flamenco footsteps on the dance floor, culminating with a series of glissandi sweeping the keyboard. In a vivid portrait of the mystical Orient, La vallee des cloches (The Valley of Bells) presents no less than six sets of pealing bells, of differing pitches and timbres in varying distances, in simple juxtaposition and counterpoint. Kim plays these most idiomatically, rounding up a set that can easily compete with the best on disc.

 

A sense of desolation and despair may be discerned in two pieces from Enrique Granados’ Goyescas, a suite inspired by the paintings of courtly love by Francisco Goya. El Amor y la muerte (Love and Death) is an exquisite tone poem that also quotes from the more familiar La Maja y el ruisenor (Maiden and the Nightingale), the beauty of tone displayed by Kim belying something more sinister and fatal. Unusually inserted between the two pieces is Ravel’s La Valse, a portrait of an empire’s end manifested by fatalistic swirling by dancers oblivious of the oblivion to come. Kim’s confident performance at once evinces glitter and glamor, but also mounting danger and desperation. On the technical front, she is unimpeachable.

 

Closing with the solo truncated edition of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Kim gives a suitably extroverted account, full of verve and swagger. With added notes, frills and doublings thrown in for good measure, this is the thrilling icing on an already impressive recital disc.

To sample / download / purchase this album, please go to the Navona Records catalogue page:

 Miroirs – Navona Records

KHATIA BUNIATISHVILI PLAYS TCHAIKOVSKY / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

KHATIA BUNIATISHVILI 

PLAYS TCHAIKOVSKY

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Thursday (14 April 2022)

 

It is a good thing that cancel culture does not obsess Singaporeans or the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. Otherwise, this concert of Russian music would have been cancelled or had its programme drastically altered. Tchaikovsky’s music belongs to the world, and not Kremlin-dwelling ideologues. Prokofiev’s music is universal and does not just reflect Russian mores. He, however, did return to his homeland from the West, and later got denounced for all his troubles. The poor man died on the same day in 1953 as Stalin, but hardly anybody noticed.

 

Under the baton of Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Litton, the orchestra showed what many people suspected all along: SSO is really good in Russian music. The concert opened with the lively Colas Breugnon Overture by Dmitri Kabalevsky, a true orchestral show-piece from a subversive 1938 opera. Much of it sounds like movie music (John Williams had probably taken some ideas from it), with the same happy and lively vibes as the better-known Ruslan and Ludmilla and Festive Overtures by Glinka and Shostakovich respectively.

 

This was a performance that could scarcely be bettered, but having said that, Kabalevsky was mostly known to have been a political apparatchik. He was never censured for his music, which was mostly Socialist Realist friendly or written for children and youths. That Vladimir Ashkenazy did not have good things to say about him in his autobiography Beyond Frontiers, or his name being completely omitted in the Shostakovich-Volkov Testimony says quite something.

  

 

Next came what the full-capacity audience had been waiting for: French-Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili in all her glittery ruby-red sequined splendour. There was a huge roar from the throng, to which she waved and blew kisses even before the performance had begun. And she did not disappoint. In the familiar warhorse that is Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, she was determined to put her personal stamp. That was to apply the most extreme of dynamics possible, big crashing chords juxtaposed with soft mincing passages, contrasted with the fastest double octaves fusillades while challenging the orchestra to keep up. Keep up they did, only just but it certainly got everyone’s attention.

 

The first movement’s barnstorming would have elicited the usual inappropriate applause, but that did not happen. This was quite a surprise, but is the audience becoming more sophisticated? This was followed by Khatia's lightest and mercurial of touches in the slow central movement, which more than justified its poetic description as a “scherzo for fireflies”. The finale marked Allegro con fuoco was more like a Prestissimo possibile by her account, again with faultless fingers flying and sweeping effortlessly over the keyboard. At the orchestral tutti leading to the final octave outburst, her gliding arms were already swaying to the music, like an eagle poised for the swooping kill. With that coup de grace, what she killed was the lingering stench left by Yundi Li from his catastrophic concerto car crash of 2009.

 

And how the audience bayed for more. She then obliged with three encores: a luminous and nuanced account of the Marcello-Bach Adagio, a souped-up version of the Liszt-Horowitz Second Hungarian Rhapsody, more outrageous than the master himself, and a jazzy arrangement of her own from her album Labyrinth. The obligatory waving and blowing of kisses followed, and there has been no louder or more vociferous reception than this since Martha Argerich in 2018.   

 

Another surprise for the evening: most of the audience stayed on to witness the orchestra perform the rarely heard Fourth Symphony of Prokofiev. Litton chose the revised 1947 edition, which is more substantial than its original 1930 version by half. Despite its unfamiliarity, the idiom was not too far distant from Romeo and Juliet or Peter and the Wolf, which made for quite gratifying listening. Much of its music was adapted from the Diaghilev-commissioned ballet The Prodigal Son, with its first and fourth movements extensively expanded from the original symphony.

 

A throwback to the classical symphonies (think Haydn and Beethoven), a slow introduction was followed by an explosive and bustling Allegro section which was convincingly brought off. The slow movement’s Lloyd Webberesque melody was introduced by Jin Ta’s flute, and the love music that ensued provided the loveliest moments of this underrated symphony. The Scherzo used the sultry seduction music from the ballet to alluring effect, and its jaunty Trio did remind one of the Cat’s theme from  Peter and the Wolf. 

The playful finale revived earlier themes, besides introducing new themes, with the music working to a impassioned climax and impressive close, and the brass having a field day. That this performance was greeted with loud accolades echoing those from Khatia’s outing, showed over two years of the Covid pandemic, the audience had become more hungry, and hopefully a more mature one.  

J.S.BACH ST.JOHN PASSION / Yong Siew Toh Conservatory & Red Dot Baroque / Review

BACH’S ST JOHN PASSION

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory

& Red Dot Baroque

Victoria Concert Hall

Saturday (9 April 2022)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 13 April 2022 with the title "Chamber performance in the spirit of Bach's time".

 

The Yong Siew Toh Conservatory of Music began its Bach Cantata Series ten years ago under its head of vocal studies Alan Bennett, later becoming an institution with regular appearances by world-renowned Baroque music specialist Masaaki Suzuki. Suzuki led its vocal and orchestral students in historically-informed performances of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music which may be described as unforgettable.

 

The Conservatory was also responsible for the education and nurturing of young violinist Alan Choo, founder of Singapore’s first professional period instrument band Red Dot Baroque (RDB). This Lenten season would have seen Suzuki conducting conservatory musicians and RDB in a performance of Bach’s St. John Passion, a musical narrative of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ according to the Gospel of John. However, due to Japan’s stringent Covid-19 restrictions, he was replaced by Choo, who led from the violin.

 

This was a chamber performance in the original spirit of Bach’s time, with a choir of just 16 members, from which all the soloists were selected. But what a sound they generated, from the opening chorus Herr, Unser Herrscher (Lord, Our Ruler), which bristled with tension and strife. Clearly this was to be a performance not lacking in conviction and passion.

 

Musical passions intend to instil in believers a sense of awe and hope, buoyed by the belief in a God who punishes evil and ultimately delivers salvation to the faithful and penitent. The German texts made no attempt to disguise the fact, helpfully aided by English transliterations projected on stage above the performers.

 

The role of the Evangelist, who narrated the events through sung recitatives, was shared by tenors Daniel Chong (in Part One) and Alan Bennett (the much longer Part Two). Their clear delivery paved the way for a series of arias from soloists, including the excellent bass-baritone Gerard Lim who portrayed Jesus with confidence and determined stoicism, and others in shorter cameos.

 

Ensemble work was incisive and tidy throughout, with players and singers responding readily to visual cues from leader Choo’s chair. He was an ever-animated presence, moving freely with each beat, as if instilling into every note an infectious vitality. The absence of a podium conductor was never missed for a moment.   

 

While dramatic fugal choruses stirred the hearts, the most intimate minutes were afforded in arias lightly accompanied by instruments from RDB, such as baroque oboes, flutes and violins in pairs. A particularly moving moment came towards the end, with alto Cindy Honanta’s sublime aria Es Ist Vollbracht! (It Is Accomplished!) with Leslie Tan’s pensive viola da gamba in perfect counterpoint.

 

The two final choruses Ruht Wohl (Be Fully At Peace) and Ich Will Dich Preisen Ewiglich (I Want To Praise You Eternally) may be on a subdued side, but its message was unmistakable. With the recession of the Covid-19 threat, this performance, greeted vociferously by a grateful full house and not socially-distanced audience, would make fervent believers out of just about anybody. 

You catch watch the concert here:

Bach Cantata Series: St. John Passion (9 Apr 2022) | YST Conservatory - YouTube

Professional photographs by Bernard Mui, 

courtesy of Yong Siew Toh Conservatory.