FLIGHTS OF FANTASY
Tedd Joselson, Piano
Musicians Initiative
Esplanade Concert Hall
Wednesday (8 June 2022)
Three score and ten is usually the age when one retires and begins to take things easier, after a life of hard work. However, for artists like Vladimir Horowitz, it was time to find a second or third wind, making his miraculous comeback during the 1980s to thrill a new generation of music lovers. For Horowitz’s sometime student Tedd Joselson, the Belgian-American pianist now permanent resident in Singapore, it was a case of history repeating itself. One was hard stretched to imagine a septuagenarian attempting three piano concertos in a single evening, but this was no mere flight of fantasy for the indefatigable.
Joselson’s recording career began in the early 1970s with the RCA recording of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto (partnered by no less than the Philadelphia Orchestra and Eugene Ormandy), so it was this concerto that opened the three-hour long marathon concert. Its familiar opening needed no introduction, and the thunderous crashing piano chords were delivered with majesty befitting the music. While the opening cadenza was somewhat of a hit and miss, that did little to faze the veteran as he breezed through the rest with relative ease. Stampeding octave passages, sitting cheek-by-jowl with lyrical asides were par for the course, and even if the later cadenza was not note-perfect, there was much to suggest that he still owned the work.
The slow movement provided much needed contrasts, and while he adroitly negotiated the mercurial and tricky central section, it was ironically in the easiest passage that the music almost came to grief. But no worries, the recovery was instantaneous, followed by the Cossack charge of the finale. This was breathlessly exciting, with Tedd at full throttle then culminating in the mother of all double octave runs rounded off with that patented Horowitz chord. Although not as immaculate as the recent performance by Khatia Buniatishvili (with the Singapore Symphony), this outing struck one as the more sincere reading. Tedd was showcasing the music rather than himself, mere servant of the composer, but could he stay the course for the evening?
The accompanying orchestra, Musicians’ Initiative, formed by professional free-lancers augmented by members of the Singapore Symphony, Singapore Chinese, Braddell Heights Symphony Orchestras, re:Sound and re:Mix, provided very decent back-up, conducted by the young and dynamic conductor Alvin Arumugam (formerly known as Alvin Seville).
The centrepiece of the evening was the world premiere of the pompously titled Lim Fantasy of Companionship, a quasi-piano concerto cobbled up from ideas for a projected musical Alan, as envisioned by the famous surgeon Susan Lim. Perhaps a project at rehabilitation, it is a self-indulgent half-hour work with Mahlerian ambitions (“The symphony is like a world. It must have everything.”), that is to encompass every possible facet of musical experience. It has “vanity project” written all over, a baokaliao rojak of one’s crack-induced fantasies. Scored for solo piano, large orchestra, pop band with drums and electric guitar, solo voice and mixed chorus, it was the combined effort of a committee (like the infamous Yellow River Concerto). Susan Lim and Christina Teenz Tan provided the words for 15 songs, Joi Barua, Ron J. Danziger and Matthieu Aymard crafted the tunes, with French composer-arranger Manu Martin orchestrating all the piecemeal bits and stringing it into a workable piano concerto form.
Who and what is Alan? According to Lim, Alan is the name of a stuffed toy lion, the avatar of the companionship provided to homo sapiens by artificial intelligence, an essential element in 21st century surgery. So is this a piano concerto, a musical, a cantata or a combination of all these? Still confused? It certainly was not Beethoven’s Choral Fantasia. Instead it tried to be a bit of everything: a Hollywood piano concerto pastiche like Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto (only far more bloated), a Lion King-like musical (minus Elton John’s genius), a kind of polystylist mix in six conjoint acts without Schnittke’s screeching dissonance. Everything and everyone is jolly and happy in this major key Utopia, a world without hunger, disease, war, cancer or Putin (although there is an evil scientist in its convoluted plot.) Assisted by tribal drumming, electronic effects, wordless chorus, and a pop song Teleportation (sung by Eymard) at the end, every Disneyland cliche thought possible is summoned, all tidily wrapped up in one dazzling son et lumiere show.
Tedd’s piano part is filled with all schmaltzy Romantic tropes, alternating between virtuoso barnstorming to playing ragtime and the moody blues like some glorified lounge pianist. Admittedly there were some touching moments, when solo piano meets cello solo (as in Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto), however short-lived, but the diffuse ideas and sheer episodic nature of the work made this incoherent whole less than the sum of its parts. No single theme stays long enough in the consciousness to be actually savoured and remembered. The final indignity was to see Joselson upstaged by Eymard belting out his number (above). The audience however loved the kitsch that it was, with a spontaneous standing ovation being the result all the creators had hoped for.
The tour de force, however, came in the concert’s second half with Brahms First Piano Concerto. Whatever musical equivalent of Viagra was needed to keep this monumental 50-minute masterpiece erect and upstanding, Joselson has stashes of these. Even a pianist half his age has little right to command the music as he did. What was his secret?
The dramatic opening orchestral tutti, marvelously marshalled by Arumugam, set the tone for Joselson’s impassioned entry. It was a solo performance that was thunderous to rock the rafters and yet allowed the music to sing, notably in the first movement’s hymn-like second subject. The slow movement’s benediction was just as spiritual as its inspirations (“Blessed he who comes in the name of the Lord” in Latin), with every response and turn of phrase in service of the music. When it came to pulling all the stops in the Rondo finale, Joselson found the much-needed reserves to barnstorm its multitudes of running notes, chords and octaves. This music by the young and impetuous Brahms makes no apologies, and Joselson was not going to shy from its bold and brassy brashness.
This was the singular highlight of the evening, and a miracle that it came at the end of two-and-a-half-hours of piano playing. It rightfully deserved another standing ovation, this time by the more discerning segment of the audience. If this is not proof of the musical greatness that still exists in Tedd Joselson, I do not know what is.
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| "What did I tell yer about this being a great concert?" |
Dr Kevin YL Tan's review
of the same concert may be found here:
pianomania: FLIGHTS OF FANTASY / Review by Dr. Kevin YL Tan (pianofortephilia.blogspot.com)
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