TO FATE WITH HOPE / NIU NIU Piano Recital / Review

 

TO FATE WITH HOPE

NIU NIU Piano Recital

Victoria Concert Hall

Sunday (31 August 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 2 September 2025 with the title "Pianist Niu Niu finds poetry in Beethoven's stormy Fifth".

For an audience bred on piano performances by the likes of Lang Lang, Li Yundi and Yuja Wang, it was a matter of time when the former child prodigy Niu Niu (牛牛) from China made his Singapore debut. His actual name is Zhang Shengliang (張勝量) but got his bovine stage name by virtue of being born in 1997, the year of the ox in the Chinese zodiac.

Niu Niu's debut album,
released in 2000.

When he was 12, he became the youngest pianist ever to record the complete Etudes of Frederic Chopin. Now at a grand old age of 28, and pursuing a very busy concert career, he clearly still possesses the chops to handle some of classical piano’s most demanding repertoire.

What Niu Niu looks like today,
in his latest album.

Beginning the recital with Felix Mendelssohn’s Rondo Capriccioso (Op.14), beloved by highly skilled youngsters, his was a totally polished reading. Its slow introduction was distinguished by genuine cantabile, later flitting off with feathery light wings in the mercurial round dance for a scintillating conclusion.

This was merely the prelude for the storms to come in Franz Liszt’s transcription of Ludwig van Beethoven’s mighty Fifth Symphony in C minor (Op.67). This is famous for its recurring da-da-da-dum four-note motif which opens its first movement. As expected, its defiant fist-shaking sequence of heavy octaves and chords ruled. Niu Niu’s view, however, was not just into voluminous pounding, but a nuanced one which also luxuriated in its myriad lights and shades.

On a C.Bechstein grand piano, he found poetry in the slow movement’s variations, and then traipsed gingerly into the Scherzo where the earlier four-note motif took the form of martial goose-stepping. The ensuing fugue with left hand octaves was tossed off with complete ease, before the finale’s grand apotheosis in C major romped home with all guns blazing. Notice how he did not ignore the diminutive piccolo’s shrill report towards the end – in sharply executed scales – showing a care for seemingly little but vital details.

Photo: Guan Ziwen

Mirroring the first half, the second opened with an amuse-bouche in Johannes Brahms’ retiring Intermezzo in A major (Op.118 No.2). Its melting lyricism and revealed inner voices silenced the audience into not applauding, instead anticipating the first notes of Franz Liszt’s monumental Sonata in B minor.

The technical prowess witnessed in the Beethoven symphony transcription was replicated in this work, the acme of perfection for piano writing in sonata form. Its four themes were clearly delineated and Niu Niu became the ideal guide in how these interacted with each other as the half-hour work unfolded. Its many digital difficulties seemed like putty in his hands as he crafted a totally coherent and convincing performance which brought out loud and prolonged applause.

As if compensate for the earlier seriousness, his encores were deliberately light-hearted. The first was his original composition Sunny Day, an upbeat and jazzy number in samba rhythm which may be described as Antonio Carlos Jobim meets Nikolai Kapustin. The second was an uproarious improvised medley mashing together nine of classical music’s most famous melodies, which brought down the house.

For the record, the nine melodies in Niu Niu’s medley were:

1. Beethoven Symphony No.5 – first movement

2. Rimsky-Korsakov Flight of the Bumble Bee (Gyorgy Cziffra version)

3. Mozart Rondo alla Turca

4. Brahms Hungarian Dance No.5

5. Chopin Polonaise Op.53

6. Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No.1 – first movement

7. Paganini-Liszt La Campanella

8. Ren Guang Cai Yun Zhui Yue (彩云追月, Colourful Clouds Chasing The Moon)

9. Puccini Nessun Dorma from Turandot

Post-concert photos:

Niu Niu meets with
Singaporean composer Tan Chan Boon
and pianist Cherry Wei Ge

The score of the Beethoven-Liszt
Symphony No.5.