DAL SEGN0 1825 / Resound Collective & Chamber Music & Arts Singapore / Review

 

DAL SEGNO 1825

Resound Collective & 

Chamber Music & Arts Singapore

Victoria Concert Hall

Saturday (8 November 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 11 November 2025 with the title "A joyous outing by Chamber Music & Arts Singapore, Resound Collective".

What happens when the two most important chamber music forces in Singapore join hands? While operating independently, Singaporean violinist Tang Tee Khoon’s Chamber Music & Arts Singapore (CMAS) and local impresario Mervin Beng’s Resound Collective have set the Singapore chamber music scene alight in recent years. Their collaboration, in a collegial spirit of partnership to make music, was inevitable.

Opening the evening was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.20 in D minor (K.466) with Hungarian pianist Zoltan Fejervari as soloist and British violinist Candida Thompson (of the renowned Amsterdam Sinfonietta) as leader. Although none of the performers onstage subscribe to the period instrument philosophy, some practices were in place.

Fejervari performed with his back to the audience, and played chords and accompanying figurations during the orchestral introduction, even before his solo entry proper. This practice harked back to a time when the keyboard was part of ensemble rather than a disparate entity. His playing was freshly minted, liberally dressed up with tasteful ornamentations, particularly in the central Romanze.

Photo: Clarence Aw

Solo cadenzas, including one by Ludwig van Beethoven for the first movement, was a reminder that Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) was still passionately in place. The finale’s shift into the key of D major was also a show of unfettered joy.

Photo: Clarence Aw

Only orchestral strings remained for the concert’s tour de force that was Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge (Great Fugue, Op.133). Originally written as a finale for his Op.130 String Quartet, its sheer dissonance and radically modern outlook saw it being cast aside for something more palatable. Standing on its own, it is still Beethoven’s toughest nut to crack, for both players and listeners.

Photo: Clarence Aw

Thompson and her 22 charges tore into its thorny thickets like persons possessed. The unison playing impressed with its fearlessness, togetherness and voluminous heft, fully aware that one false step would mean total chaos. The fugal entries came quick and fast but nobody missed a cue as the evening’s most intense quarter-hour drew the first half to an impressive close.

Felix Mendelssohn’s String Octet in E flat major (Op.20), composed at 16, is a miracle of precocity besides being a favourite of chamber festivals. Bringing together two string quartets, usually of different origins and countenances, as a harmonious whole is a secret to its success.

Photo: Clarence Aw

All the eight players, violinists Thompson, Tang and Yang Shuxiang (Singapore) and Liv Hilde Klokk-Bryhn (Norway), violists Julianne Lee (USA) and Ida Klokk-Bryhn (Norway), cellists Eckart Runge (Germany) and Cho Hang-oh (South Korea), sounded as if they had been playing as close partners all their lives.

Such unity was affirmed on its outset, the opening movement buzzing with activity, contrasted with the slow movement’s moving lyricism. The familiar Scherzo flew with the lightness of fairies’ wings, while the fugal finale with its quote of “And He Shall Reign Forever” from Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus became a ringing refrain. There can be no better advertisement for the joy of chamber music such as this.

Photo: Clarence Aw