ZOLTAN FEJERVARI & KENNETH HAMILTON Piano Recitals / Review

ZOLTAN FEJERVARI 

Piano Recital 

Victoria Concert Hall 

Saturday (6 April 2024) 

MORE DEMONIC AND DIVINE 

KENNETH HAMILTON 

Piano Recital 

Esplanade Recital Studio 

Tuesday (9 April 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 12 April 2024 with the title "Lyrical readings of Romantic composers".

Piano music of the Romantic era was on the cards in two recitals given by visiting artists. Last Saturday evening saw young Hungarian pianist Zoltan Fejervari’s Singapore debut, presented by Altenburg Arts. The repertoire offered is well-represented on record but how often does one encounter these in recital? 

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

Russian great Piotr Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons should have been called The Months, as its 12 pieces – from January to December – were commissioned by a subscription musical journal. He dutifully churned these out every four weeks, but Fejervari showed in sensitive and feeling performances this was no hack job. 

Although these were mostly salon-like miniatures crafted with amateurs in mind, he brought out longing and nostalgia, not least in March (Song of the Lark), June (Barcarolle) and October (Autumn Song). August (The Harvest) and November (Troika) posed considerable technical challenges but were whipped off with greatest of ease. 

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

Johannes Brahms’ final Four Piano Pieces (Op.119) provided more profound utterances. The first two explored ambiguous tonalities looking ahead to 20th century modernism, where Fejervari found an implicit poetry, while the last two – a playful Intermezzo and heroic Rhapsody – reverted to virtuoso form. 

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

Robert Schumann’s Humoreske (Op.20) is almost a rarity, comprising varied mood pieces tightly strung together. Lyricism, alternating with whimsical diversions, was his brand of “humour”, possessed with the unpredictability of not knowing what comes next. 

Despite such seemingly diffuse ideas, Fejervari’s masterly reading was one that sought fantasy, probed for truths but ultimately found beauty within. His quiet encores of Schumann’s Night Piece (Op.23 No.4) and Janacek’s Madonna of Frydek from On An Overgrown Path were just sublime. 

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

A typical Kenneth Hamilton pose,
with gesticulating hands doing the talking.

Scottish pianist Kenneth Hamilton is a regular visitor here, his recitals being entertaining discourses on Romantic era and Golden Age pianism. Tuesday’s show juxtaposed divinity and devilry by alternating and contrasting works of close contemporaries Frederic Chopin and Franz Liszt. 

Chopin is the musical goody-two-shoes. His Nocturne in E flat major (Op.55 No.2) unfolded like an operatic duet with intertwined voices. The Prelude in C sharp minor (Op.45) was an oasis of calm, and the Barcarolle (Op.60) as rapturous love song seemed to bear that notion out. Hamilton’s playing was vivid and luminous, unafraid to dig in with heartfelt emotions. 

Liszt is classical music’s bad boy, but was he really? The Scherzo and March (previously titled Wild Hunt) was unruliness personified, its brutish assault on the senses being calculated for maximal effect. Hamilton let fly without apology, with fistfuls of wrong notes part of the territory. Polish and politeness would simply not do here. 

The chaste and contrite Andante Lagrimoso, from Poetic And Religious Harmonies, saw profound sadness morphing into spiritual comfort. Far more nuanced than people give him credit for, more conflicting forces came to bear in Liszt’s Reminiscences de Robert le Diable, which grafted the transcription of Cavatine from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera with its riotous Infernal Dance. 

This Singapore premiere had it all, with gushing lyricism and lush harmonies devolving into the unadulterated vulgarity of unabashed note-spinning. With added passages and flourishes rendering the original even more brilliant, Hamilton took this musical circus act in his stride, closing with the kind of din intended to shock and enthrall. 

As before and now, how the audience loved it. Hamilton’s encores were both by Chopin, a fussily filigreed edition of the famous E flat major Nocturne (Op.9 No.2), and the Heroic Polonaise (Op.53) with far more raging octaves thrown into the mix. By now, the aesthetic divide between Chopin and Liszt had become irrevocably muddied.

TWO PIANO RECITALS NOT TO BE MISSED: KENNETH HAMILTON on 9 APRIL 2024

Here is another piano recital not to be missed. Scottish pianist KENNETH HAMILTON, presently based in Cardiff, has been a regular visitor and recitalist in Singapore. A specialist and scholar in Romantic pianism and performance practice, he has been responsible for Singapore premieres of works by Liszt, Alkan, John Ireland and Ronald Stevenson. His latest recital offers more discoveries for the curious listener, especially one who seeks divine and diabolical inspirations in music.

KENNETH HAMILTON performs 

WAGNER-LISZT Tannhauser Overture

KENNETH HAMILTON Piano Recital

MORE DEMONIC AND DIVINE

Programme:

CHOPIN Nocturne 

   in E flat major, Op.55 No.2

CHOPIN Prelude in C sharp minor, Op.45

CHOPIN Barcarolle 

   in F sharp major, Op.60

LISZT Scherzo & March

LISZT Andante Lagrimoso

MEYERBEER-LISZT Cavatine 

   from Robert le Diable

LISZT Reminiscences de Robert le Diable

Get your tickets here:

More Demonic and Divine by Kenneth Hamilton [G] (sistic.com.sg)

KENNETH HAMILTON / LILYA ZILBERSTEIN / Piano Recitals / Review

 

KENNETH HAMILTON Piano Recital

Esplanade Recital Studio

Wednesday (5 April 2023)

 

LILYA ZILBERSTEIN Piano Recital

Victoria Concert Hall

Thursday (6 April 2023)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 10 April 2023 with the title "Rare piano works a treat in two recitals". 

For every recital of Chopin’s piano music, there should be a recital that presents something different. It was thus refreshing to encounter visiting international artists going out on a limb to perform rarities, two such persons being Scottish pianist Kenneth Hamilton and Russia-born German pianist Lilya Zilberstein. On two consecutive evenings, their audiences were treated to works likely to have been Singapore premieres.

 

On Wednesday evening, Hamilton showed exactly why Italian composer-pianist Ferruccio Busoni’s transcription of Franz Liszt’s organ work Fantasy on Ad nos, Ad salutarem undam (Come To Us, To Waves Of Salvation) has never previously been performed here. It is a dense, thickly contrapuntal behemoth lasting the best part of a half-hour, overflowing with multitudes of chords and octaves, requiring relentless stamina and endurance to pull off.

 

Based on a chorale melody from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera The Prophet, the metamorphosis from its bare bones, through tumultuous struggles to reach benedictional heights and fugal consummation was a momentous journey in itself. Hamilton’s mastery of its digital and physical demands, while fleshing out spiritual inspirations, was a marvel to behold.   

 

Balancing the heavyweight programme was Brahms’ considerably more accessible Handel Variations, filled with thorny thickets of its own. While its mighty concluding fugue brought out the plaudits, Hamilton also revealed a more intimate side to his pianism. Both works were preceded by a Chopin Nocturne, selected with the appropriate mood and tonality to set the stage. As a further point in symmetry, transcriptions of J.S.Bach by Busoni and Alexander Siloti opened and closed his recital with an air of sublimity.  

 

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

Zilberstein’s recital on Thursday evening opened with familiar music. Schubert’s Six Musical Moments may be considered student fodder, but she brought out a wealth of sonority from what seemed like simple lines. This continued into a selection of four Schubert lieder transcriptions by Liszt, dressed with complex harmonisations and virtuosic devices. Through all these, one did not just hear prodigiously spun out notes but an unbroken thread of singing voices.  

 

Her second half was far more esoteric, with the listener being led to ask, “Why have we not heard this before?” French composer Ernest Chausson is famous for his Poeme for violin and orchestra, but his Quelques Danses (Some Dances) deserves to be better known. Its mundane title belied a progression of delicious, often surprising and ear-catching harmonies, which Zilberstein delivered with a missionary zeal and sweeping aplomb.

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

 

Carl Czerny’s fussily-titled Introduction, Variations Brillantes et Rondo de Chasse (Op.202) may be classified under the pigeon-hole of early Romantic virtuoso pot-boilers. Czerny, Beethoven’s most famous student and Liszt’s most important teacher, is underrated because he was just too prolific. Zilberstein’s ability to transcend its florid and overdone ornamentations, however, persuaded one to regard these entertaining diversions as virtues, and even long for more. 

Her choice of encores was just as intriguing. There was more Chausson, his Paysage (Landscape) wallowed in luscious pre-Debussyan harmonies, while Soviet era Russian composer Georgy Svirodov's rhythmically quirky Musical Moment was the perfect sweetmeat to go home with.

Rarities rule, because both Hamilton and Zilberstein demonstrably said so.

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

A PIANO RECITAL NOT TO MISS: KENNETH HAMILTON ROMANTIC FANTASIES & FUGUES

Here is a piano recital not to be missed! 

Scottish super-virtuoso KENNETH HAMILTON returns to perform a recital of piano works you will be unlikely to encounter outside of usual concert venues. A specialist of Romantic piano music by Liszt, Alkan, Busoni and Ronald Stevenson, Hamilton will present the Singapore premiere of Busoni's transcription of Franz Liszt's monumental organ work Fantasy and Fugue on Ad nos, ad salutarem undam, alongside Brahms' highly demanding Variations on a Theme by Handel and shorter works.

ROMANTIC FANTASIES & FUGUES

KENNETH HAMILTON Piano Recital

Programme:

BACH-BUSONI Ich ruf zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ

CHOPIN Nocturne in B flat minor

BRAHMS Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel

CHOPIN Nocturne in G minor

LISZT-BUSONI Fantasy and Fugue on Ad nos, ad salutarem undam

Wednesday 5 April 2023

Esplanade Recital Studio, 7.30 pm

Tickets from $14 available at:

Romantic Fantasies and Fugues - A Piano Recital by Kenneth Hamilton - Esplanade

KENNETH HAMILTON PLAYS LISZT Volume 1: DEATH & TRANSFIGURATION / Review

KENNETH HAMILTON PLAYS LISZT

VOLUME 1: DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION

Kenneth Hamilton, Piano

Prima Facie 167/168 / 2 CDs

 

The Covid pandemic has kept many an artist depressed and out of work, but Cardiff-based Scottish pianist Kenneth Hamilton has been busy in the recording studio. Recorded between January 2019 and May 2020, his first anthology of Franz Liszt piano works centres on music composed after his retirement from a glittering and glamourous concert career. With Lisztomania out of the way, he focussed on composing, teaching, philosophising and taking minor orders from the Vatican.

 

This is music of the mature and wizened Liszt, who plumbed the depths of the spiritual realm and beyond. Given the heightened risks and uncertainties of the pandemic, there is scarcely a soul who will not ponder on life and death, or where we came from and where we go from here. This recital addresses that existential need, a close and personal look at Liszt’s own thirst for spiritual sustenance and regeneration, his response to bereavement and how he found his peace.  

 

Four pieces from his cycle Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (published 1853) are included, with three in the first disc which opens with Funérailles. This is a familiar enough work memorialising deaths in the Hungarian revolution of 1848 (and possibly Chopin a year later), but the bell tolls four times instead of the usual two in its short lead in. Following this is the sublime Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, one of Liszt’s most genuine spiritual utterances, which receives a magisterial reading not short of attention to the filigree and fine details. Pensée de mort (Thought of the Dead) is not well-known, totally underrated despite sharing thematic similarities and form as the Sonata in B minor. It is essentially a tone poem for piano solo that climaxes in De Profundis, clamavi ad te Domine (From the Depths, I Call Out To You, Lord), despairing cry of the recently departed.  

Franz Liszt the Sage

 

A selection of Liszt’s late pieces, casting him as a visionary pointing to the future, have been sprinkled along the way. Raw dissonances distinguish the menacing Csárdás Macabre,  which is in complete contrast with the bleakness and harmonic ambiguity of Nuages Gris. That the latter leads directly to the great Sonata in B minor is a masterstroke of programming not immediately apparent. Both works are harmonically linked by the key of G minor, which shifts like drifting clouds to a home in B minor. The Sonata is the perfect study of thematic transformation, a sprawling single-movement work of pure genius that gets the performance it deserves. At just under 27 and a half minutes, Hamilton’s performance is one of the swifter ones, comparable with those by Martha Argerich and Leslie Howard, but nowhere does he feel rushed. He just does not linger in the slower contemplative sections.

 

Opening the second disc is the Ballade No.2 (1853), also in B minor, and positively the best reason to hear both discs in quick succession. Thereafter until the last work is a varied collection of short pieces – lyrical and late works – many of which will be unfamiliar to most listeners, with the exception of Schubert’s Impromptu in G flat major in Liszt’s own edition. It is the same music until past the half-way mark when he gilds the melodic line with a treble voice. A most interesting addition it is, complementing the brief Ave Maria (also from the Harmonies cycle), unrelated to the famous Schubert lied, and lovely transcriptions of Liszt’s own songs Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth and  Die Lorelei.

 

Just as lyrical are the late pieces Abschied (1885, written for his Russian student Alexander Siloti), En rêve (1885, written for August Stradal who transcribed his symphonic poems for piano), Romance (1848) and Romance oubliée (1881). The last two works are based on the same music, the latter being a re-writing of the former, thought to be lost or “forgotten”. But notice how his perspective has changed over the years. 

Of the pieces of mourning, Dem andenken Petofis (In Memory of Petofis, published 1877) sounds like a postlude to Funerailles. Prelude to Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (Weeping, Lamentation, Weeping, Despair) of 1859, following the death of son Daniel, was famously recorded by Horowitz just before his death. La Lugubre Gondola I (1886) was written in response to the death of his son-in-law Richard Wagner. There are hardly any sadder or darker works than these in the Liszt catalogue.    

Kenneth Hamilton 
is your personal Liszt scholar.

 

Closing the album is Liszt’s popular transcription of Isoldes Liebestod from Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, with the notion of love and death finding its glorious final fruition. A perfectly redemptive end to a journey that began with mortality. Accompanying this odyssey are copious exhaustively well-researched notes by Hamilton himself, where the aid of a magnifying glass becoming paramount. There is not a single vulgar work or superfluous note in these 152 minutes of music. That curious predicament will certainly be fixed in Kenneth Hamilton’s second Liszt album, of transcriptions and arrangements entitled Salon and Stage.

 

ROMANTIC PIANO ENCORES / KENNETH HAMILTON, Piano / Review

ROMANTIC PIANO ENCORES

KENNETH HAMILTON, Piano

Prima Facie PFCD160

TT: 74’46”

 

It is no great secret that for many people, the favourite part of a piano recital takes place at the end when the pianist begins to perform encores. Encores are an invaluable part of the concert experience, offering additional insight to a performer’s artistic personality besides being delicious little bonbons to send the audience home happy.

 

Encores have become so important that the Sydney International Piano Competition now includes a mandatory segment for the performance of encores during its preliminary and final rounds. The choice of encores with respect to recital programmes also determines the competitor’s overall success in the eyes of the jury.

 

Scottish pianist Kenneth Hamilton’s generous album of encores encompasses both the familiar/popular and obscure/little-played, from miniatures to truly substantial pieces. Many are transcriptions or paraphrases, but there are also several original pieces. Already well-known are the Schumann-Liszt Widmung, Bach-Siloti Prelude in B minor, Tchaikovsky-Rachmaninov Lullaby and Percy Grainger’s Irish Tune from County Derry, all played with eloquence and idiomatic flair.

 

Several surprises take the form of popular melodies from unexpected sources. J.S.Bach’s flute Siciliano as transcribed by Alkan does not sound all that different from the familiar Kempff. It certainly is not unkempt, pardon the bad pun. Saint-Saëns’ The Swan as reconceived by Lawrence Glover (late Scottish pianist, former teacher of Hamilton’s) is unfussy and straight, shorn of all Godowskyan filigree. It is believed that this is a World Premiere recording.

Original works include Elgar’s In Smyrna (a less-than-exotic look at Turkey), Grainger’s Colonial Song (close cousin to his Londonderry Air) and Paderewski’s splendidly un-Chopinesque Nocturne.    

 

Kenneth Hamilton
pondering what to play next.

Among the longer encores, there is a rare airing for Mendelssohn’s Fantasy on The Last Rose of Summer, a virtuosic set of variations on the same Irish melody heard in Friedrich von Flotow’s opera Martha. Also of operatic origin is Grainger’s Ramble on the Love Duet from Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, and has there been a more cumbersome title (other than Schulz-Evler’s Arabesques on Johann Strauss II’s On The Beautiful Blue Danube) than this? The Ramble on Love (for short) receives a tender and perfumed reading that deserves many listens.

 

The two Johann Strauss waltz tributes are also the lengthiest pieces on show. Voices of Spring (Frühlingsstimmen) by Ignaz Friedman is perhaps less well-known as Alfred Grünfeld’s, but is an extended and elaborate affair, more a fantasy than mere transcription. Godowsky’s Symphonic Metamorphosis on Artist’s Life (Künstlerleben), besides being quite a mouthful, is the most complex and gloriously polyphonic of the lot. Hamilton takes two minutes longer than Earl Wild’s famous 1960s recording but he is no slouch. The decadently insouciant music gets the grand treatment it deserves.

 

This encore album is totally enjoyable, with witty and insightful programme notes penned by Hamilton himself, which can only be added pleasure.

 

MORE PRELUDES TO CHOPIN / Kenneth Hamilton (Piano) / Review

MORE PRELUDES TO CHOPIN

NOCTURNES, WALTZES AND OTHER WORKS

KENNETH HAMILTON, Piano

Prima Facie / PFCD 134

This is the Cardiff-based Scottish pianist Kenneth Hamilton’s second Chopin recital disc built upon the subject of preludes. The prélude is a short piece meant to preceding a more extended work, but Chopin did not really plan it that way. He wrote 27 preludes, 24 of which were included in his well-known Op.28 set. He however never performed all of these in a single sitting (unlike what recordings and piano competitions suggest), instead picking a choice few for his recitals.

Hamilton’s juxtapositioning of preludes and longer pieces is both imaginative and ingenious. The most obvious pairing comes at the beginning, the C minor Prélude (Op.28 No.20) followed by the C minor Nocturne (Op.48 No.1). The two fit like hand and glove. Then it becomes less predictable when harmonic and key signature relationships do not play a part. Mood and emotion take over when the E minor Prélude (Op.28 No.4) comes before the A minor Waltz (Op.34 No.2). Both pieces explore different aspects of melancholy.  

 

Resolute chords link the Prélude in E major (Op.28 No.9) with the Polonaise-Fantasy in A flat major (Op.61), two otherwise unrelated keys. Diametrically contrasted works – the coruscating B flat minor Prélude (Op.28 No.16) and the serene E flat Nocturne (Op.55 No.2) – hang on a single note. A high B flat unites both pieces. 

When can a prélude precede another prélude? When their keys are D flat major (Op.28 No.15, the Raindrop) and C sharp minor (Op.28 No.10, the Night Moth, both according to Hans von Bülow) respectively. Which is followed by the C sharp minor Waltz (Op.64 No.2), of course. 

There is much to enjoy in this programme, which also includes the popular E flat major Nocturne (Op.9 No.2) in a rarely heard and more florid alternative version, Variations Brillante (Op.12), the First Ballade (Op.23), and more préludes. 

A third volume awaits. Hamilton’s playing is up there with the best of Chopin intepreters, and it is his spirited advocacy of programme planning by preluding that makes this recital disc stand above the routine. 

CD Review (The Straits Times, April 2019)

PRELUDES TO CHOPIN

KENNETH HAMILTON, Piano

Prima Facie 084 / ****1/2

Does the musical world need more recordings of Frederic Chopin’s piano music? If your answer is “No”, then think again, as the Cardiff-based Scottish pianist Kenneth Hamilton makes a persuasive case of listening to Chopin differently, based on his research of historical performances. Even his ordering of the pieces is unusual. Every major work is prefaced by one Prelude. These short pieces, originally conceived to precede longer pieces, can now be heard in context.

The nocturne-like Prélude in C sharp minor Op.45, often played as a stand-alone piece, is heard before the “Funeral March” Second Sonata (Op.35) in B flat minor. These two keys are harmonically related, and the ear perceives the movements as almost seamless. 

In the Funeral March proper, the inclusion of bass octaves makes it sound doubly harrowing. His later inclusion of the stormy Prélude in E flat minor (Op.28 No.14) is canny too, serving as a belated echo to the sonata’s eerie finale, once described as “wind blowing over the graveyard”.    

Hamilton’s view of the Third Sonata in B minor (Op.58) is short-winded by omitting the 1^st movement repeat, the perfect antithesis of Lang Lang’s intractable reading. In the “Heroic” Polonaise in A flat major (Op.53), he plays Ferruccio Busoni’s amplifications in the galloping octave episode, creating an over-the-top and thunderous effect. 

Finally, he performs Franz Liszt’s own elaboration of Chopin’s Polish song Moya Pieszczotka (Mes Joies or My Joys) as remembered by Liszt student Bernhard Stevenhagen on a piano roll. This is Chopin heard through new ears indeed.  

CD Review (The Straits Times, February 2018)

BACK TO BACH

KENNETH HAMILTON, Piano

Prima Facie  CD061 / *****

When pianophiles talk about hyphenated Bach, they are referring to Johann Sebastian Bach's music in arrangements or transcriptions specifically for the piano by later composers. Thus Bach-Busoni is not a person, but describes the authorship of Bach's music as transcribed by the Italian piano virtuoso and scholar Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924).

This excellent album of “Tributes and Transcriptions” celebrates the cult of Bach, the most famous transcription being Busoni's take on the Chaconne in D minor, an elaborately dressed-up gothic edifice which has occasionally overshadowed the original for solo violin. Rachmaninov's transcription of three movements – Prelude, Gavotte and Gigue – from Violin Partita No.3 is so romanticised that the original sounds strangely quaint.

The four letters that make up the surname Bach (B flat-A-C-B natural) has a life of its own in the  Fantasia And Fugue On B-A-C-H by Franz Liszt, a show of imperious pianism which is mirrored in even more monumental Variations On Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, also by Liszt. 

In between are Busoni's lovely chorale prelude transcriptions, miniatures by comparison. Scottish pianist Kenneth Hamilton's authoritative but persuasive playing is accompanied by his own insightful and witty programme notes which make this a complete package one would regularly return to.   

CD Review (The Straits Times, April 2017)

KENNETH HAMILTON

plays RONALD STEVENSON Vol.1

KENNETH HAMILTON, Piano

Prima Facie  PFCD050 / ****1/2

Ronald Stevenson (1928-2015) was one of Scotland's greatest musical treasures, a larger-than-life figure in the mould of Franz Liszt (West Linton near Edinburgh was his Weimar), and musical heir to pianist-composers like Ferruccio Busoni and Percy Grainger. 

Described to be “incapable of writing a genuinely easy piano piece”, this recital album by his disciple Kenneth Hamilton is an excellent introduction to his contrapuntally complex yet accessible style. Not a single note is superfluous or wasted. 

Of the three major works here, best-known is his Peter Grimes Fantasy, where themes from Benjamin Britten's opera are pithily compacted into 8 minutes, much like in Busoni's Carmen Fantasy. Beltane Bonfire, inspired by a Scottish folk festival, is both fugal and virtuosic, a competition showpiece. The monumental Symphonic Elegy For Liszt superficially resembles a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody, but with distinct Scottish accents.

Stevenson is also shown as an effective miniaturist in his arrangements of Scottish ballads and Elizabethan dances, while his transcriptions of Ivor Novello's We'll Gather Lilacs and Richard Tauber's My Heart And I are so luscious as to be almost decadent. Hamilton cleverly throws in Rachmaninov's own Lilacs just to prove the point. A revelatory and enriching listen beckons.  

DON'T MISS:

MUSICAL PORTRAITS

KENNETH HAMILTON Piano Recital

Tuesday, 18 April 2017

Esplanade Recital Studio, 7.30 pm

Programme includes:

STEVENSON Three Scottish Ballades

CHOPIN  Sonata No.3

ALKAN By the Waters of Babylon

MERRICK-STEVENSON Hebridean Seascape

DEBUSSY L'isle joyeuse

LISZT Deux Legendes

Tickets at $32 available at SISTIC

https://www.sistic.com.sg/events/kenneth0417

Please click on link above to buy tickets.

HERE'S ONE CONCERT YOU SHOULD NOT MISS: PIANO FANTASIES by KENNETH HAMILTON

Just love piano music but cannot wait till the annual Singapore International Piano Festival? Here is a recital by one of the piano world's most interesting and intrepid pianists, Kenneth Hamilton.

His annual offering on Sunday 5 April at the Esplanade Recital Studio (7.30 pm) is a recital wholly of fantasies for the piano. Here is the full programme listing:

BEETHOVEN Fantasy, Op.77

SCHUMANN Fantasie in C major, Op.17

CHOPIN Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op.61

MENDELSSOHN Fantasy on 

The Last Rose of Summer

HANDEL-LISZT Almira Paraphrase

VERDI-LISZT Rigoletto Paraphrase

Sunday, 5 April 2015 at 7.30 pm

Esplanade Recital Studio

Tickets still available at SISTIC

For more about Kenneth Hamilton's interesting programme, check out this INTERVIEW with Natalie Ng where he displays his usual erudition and good humour: 

http://plinkplonkplunk.com/2015/04/01/piano-fantasies-interview

  

Here's what I had to say about Kenneth Hamilton's previous performances in Singapore in my Foreword to his latest recital. Hope that helps in persuading you to attend another masterly evening of piano music!:

It gives me great pleasure in welcoming back Scottish pianist Kenneth Hamilton for yet another exciting and intriguing recital of piano music.

I first got to meet Ken after his first Esplanade Recital Studio recital in 2007, when I was the Artistic Director of the Singapore International Piano Festival. Then I was busily involved in planning thematic programmes around specific piano repertoire, incorporating the great Romantic works for piano by Chopin, Liszt, Godowsky, Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Medtner and their like. Some of the themes had included The Golden Age of The Piano (in 2006) and Lisztomania: The Art of Virtuosity (2007), and then out of the blue came an invitation from the University of Birmingham to attend a piano recital entitled An Orchestra At The Keyboard by some Professor Kenneth Hamilton.

Having never heard of Kenneth Hamilton before, I wondered what sort of crazy person would programme Chopin’s Funeral March Sonata, Liszt’s transcription of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture and Alkan’s Aesop’s Feast in the same recital, and then offer the Sousa-Horowitz The Stars and Stripes Forever as an encore. In short, the zaniest programmer of piano festivals (a title I would gladly claim) had met his match in the most intrepid and adventurous of pianists, a sort of David Livingstone meets Indiana Jones on the keyboard.    

The reference to the great explorer Livingstone is probably apt because he too was Scottish, and Hamilton’s explorations in the more arcane alleyways of the piano literature and the missionary zeal in which he applies himself to his pursuits are just astounding. Not just satisfied with promoting Liszt, Alkan, hyphenated-Bach and Busoni, he has also been an indefatigable proselytiser of John Ireland (who was English despite his name) and fellow Scotsman Ronald Stevenson.

Here are the themes which Ken has created in his Singapore recitals down the years:

2007: An Orchestra At The Keyboard

2008: Virtuoso Piano Transcriptions
2009: Virtuoso Piano Transcriptions - Encore!

2011: The Virtuoso Liszt

2012: 200 Years Of The Piano

2013: Romantic Masterpieces

2014: Back To Bach

Titles alone do not do justice to the wealth of piano treats he has bestowed on Singaporean audiences, including Singaporean premieres of the Hexameron (by 6 Romantic composers including Liszt and Chopin), Alkan’s transcription of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.20 and Alkan’s own devilish Concerto for Solo Piano. You may call him a one-man piano festival.

As the author of After The Golden Age, a treatise on piano performance practice in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century, Ken has had on occasion put preaching into practice. Who can forget the time when he came out and serenaded the audience while they were finding their seats, or the art of preluding, when he doodled for a few moments before actually playing a work, or interluding by improvising between pieces? All these are is part and parcel of being a pianist from a bygone era, and Ken with his inimitable manner of introducing each work never fails to engage his audience.  

This evening, he delves into the world of fantasies with yet another delicious selection of works written in the free form (hence the word fantasy, as opposed to the boring old sonata form), some familiar and others less so. One thing is for certain, be prepared to be entertained, enthralled and enlightened.     

Chang Tou Liang

www.pianofortephilia.blogspot.com

Former Artistic Director,

Singapore International Piano Festival