HUNGARIAN PIANO QUINTETS
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory
Faculty & Students
Conservatory Concert Hall
Wednesday (18 March 2026)
It is no longer a secret. Yong Siew Toh Conservatory is the best place in Singapore to enjoy chamber music. T’ang Quartet, Red Dot Baroque, Lorong Boys and the Singapore Chamber Music Festival are resident here and its faculty (many of whom are chamber music veterans) and students are fully involved in chamber music making. Not to mention the many visiting chamber groups – Takacs, Hagen, Juilliard, Brodsky, Jerusalem, Miro and Verona Quartets, Calefax et cetera.
This evening of piano quintets is likely to have included two Singapore premieres, unless Take 5 (Lim Yan and company) had earlier gotten their hands to them. At any rate, pianist Albert Tiu (Head of Piano), violinists Qian Zhou (Head of Strings) and Chien Hsin (3rd year student), violist Zou Zhang (alumnus) and cellist Wang Zihao (alumnus) performed two rarities, two very demanding piano quintets by two great Hungarian composers. Both Tiu and Qian took turns to introduce the works and their nostalgic qualities, especially harking back to their late Romantic roots.
The Second Piano Quintet in E flat minor (Op.26) of Ernő Dohnanyi (1877-1960), composed in 1914, is less often heard than his earlier C major quintet. It opened in dark and mysterious hues with piano tremolos, then revealing an idiom influenced by Brahms. The throes of passion and intensity generated, with tension alternating with moments of playfulness defined this music. The five players sunk their teeth in and never let off.
The central Intermezzo relived the dance music of old Vienna, a gemutlichkeit later celebrated by the likes of Kreisler and Korngold. A fast scherzo-like section flew with Mendelssohnian lightness, also containing the witty writing to be found in Dohnanyi’s famous Variations on a Nursery Theme and moments that could have influenced John Williams’ Harry Potter music. The weighty finale opened with a fugue from the strings, contrasted by a chorale theme on piano. The warmth of sonority radiated through Straussian harmonies, then darkened as earlier themes returned (in the Lisztian cyclical manner referred to by Tiu) before closing quietly.
The only Piano Quintet (Sz.23), in C major, by Bela Bartok (1881-1945) is an early work that even predates the Dohnanyi. Composed in 1903-04, its sprawling four movements that play for over 40 minutes recalled the aspirations of Brahms’ own piano quintet. That was the only similarity, a superficial one, as Bartok’s was by far a more jolly and extrovert piece, quite unlike the folk-inspired barbarism of later and more representative works. Sheer opulence is hardly something attributable to Bartok, and this uncharacteristic masterpiece was cut from the same silky linen as his Rhapsody Op.1 (Sz.26) for piano and orchestra, an update on Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, also from 1904.
The ensuing Vivace had similarities with the earlier Dohnanyi Intermezzo, an old world dance with the quality of a burlesque, except its whimsicality was a little more vigourous. The Adagio was harmonically the most adventurous, its chromaticism yielding an elegiac movement in C minor with genuine Slavic pathos. More Straussian harmonies were heard, and this continued attacca into the Vivace finale, where the first movement theme returned, but now transformed into a joyous polka-like dance. Now ensconced in Hary Janos (Kodaly’s comedic opera) territory, humour ruled with several false endings before closing abruptly in high spirits.
The loud and vociferous applause more than provided encouragement for further chamber concerts of this kind to return. So watch this space.
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| A bravissimo to all the performers. |
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