JINHO KIM PLAYS CHOPIN / Review

JINHO KIM PLAYS CHOPIN

Esplanade Recital Studio

Friday (26 April 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 29 April 2013 with the title "Chopin with sympathy and authority".

Frederic Chopin (1810-1849) is one composer whose piano music is varied and absorbing enough to sustain an entire recital. When performed with both sympathy and authority, it makes a rewarding proposition. Such was the case with Korean pianist Jinho Kim, presently an artist-in-residence at the LaSalle College of the Arts. Kim may be considered a Chopin specialist, having been the only person to have performed both Chopin’s piano concertos at Esplanade in a single concert.

Tickets for his all-Chopin recital were “sold out” and people had to be turned away at the box office. Yet there remained significant gaping lacunae in the seats, a public relations faux pas on the part of event management and no-show patrons, which was only mitigated by the quality of the playing. Kim showed that Chopin’s music was full-blooded, not effete or sickly.

Both dramatic and declamatory, the opening bars of the Second Sonata in B flat minor (Op.35), marked Grave, demonstrated on the outset he had something urgent to say about the music. The life and death struggles were brought out trenchantly, and the repeat which rightly included those vital bars upped the ante for the movement’s tumultuous development.

There was no relenting in the equally belligerent Scherzo, and even some notes were missed here and there, it was forgivable during the heat of the moment. The eponymous Funeral March was a dignified procession, the central cantabile being a brief oasis of repose. The whirlwind Presto finale, played with a remarkable evenness, was a chilling portrayal of the afterlife – an unforgiving terminal void. Little wonder the genteel Mendelssohn was so sickened by this work.

Chopin by Eugene Delacroix

The shorter works between the big sonatas were very well chosen. The Nocturne in D flat major (Op.27 No.2), beautifully gilded, evinced genuine warmth and nostalgia. The Second Scherzo in B flat minor (Op.31) closed the first half on a coruscating high despite the split note at the end. The three Mazurkas that opened the second half were totally satisfying, the gentle lilt in triple time being a potent reminder of Chopin’s Polish nationalism.

Concluding with the less frenzied Third Sonata in B minor (Op.58), Kim brought out a patrician, more restrained view of a classic. His sense of proportion was unerring in the substantial first movement, omitting the exposition repeat being a good choice on the occasion. The etude-like Scherzo could have sparkled a little more, but it was the expansive slow movement and its painstaking build-up that evoked the greatest pathos.

The rollicking finale that followed rode on waves of seemingly unlimited reserves, each statement of the resolutely striding theme arriving inexorably and with greater finality. After its brilliant end, Kim asked the audience, “Shall I play some Rachmaninov?” His view of the Elegie in E flat minor (Op.3 No.1) had an elegant and brooding melancholy that was hard to resist. The Russian Rachmaninov could be the subject of his next recital. So, what about it?

Singapore Architecture: From Mackenzie Road to McNally Street

How does one attend an event at the LaSalle College of the Arts without incurring exorbitant ERP and car parking charges? The solution: park at the fairly large carpark at the end of Mackenzie Road, just by the edge of the Istana. Its free after 5pm besides being outside of the CBD. Total costs: 0 dollars 0 cents! Then take a leisurely walk to Selegie Road where the imposing LaSalle College edifice is within a stone's throw. Meanwhile, enjoy some interesting buildings along the way.

New condominiums on a recently gentrified Mackenzie Road, with the old bus depot (now a used car mart) just across the street nearby.

The venerable Rex Theatre with its age-old banyan tree. I remember watching Earthquake (starring Charlton Heston) with Sensurround here with my kid brothers.

Ellison Building with its eateries. The Star of David on its facade suggests that its first owners (or builders) were Jewish.

The ugly new look of Sungai Road, part of Little India.

The LaSalle College of the Arts, one of Singapore's most distinctive looking buildings.

Airy spaces and skybridges link its buildings.

The address is 1 McNally Street, named after Brother Joseph McNally, one of Singapore's pioneer artists and educators, and LaSalle's most famous principal.

MUSIC BY JOHN SHARPLEY / Review

MUSIC BY JOHN SHARPLEY
SIA Auditorium
LaSalle College of the Arts
Tuesday (17 March 2009, 1pm)

If a history of Western classical music in Singapore were written in fifty years’ time or so, Houston-born composer and pedagogue John Sharpley, now a Singapore permanent resident, might well occupy a position not too distant from Antonin Dvorak’s in American music. In a case of musical reverse-colonisation, his works have often taken on Asian inspirations and flavours.

This chamber concert of Sharpley’s music, however, revealed more of his homespun Americana. Three movements from The Lone Star (2007), a piano tribute to his home state of Texas that began the concert, were as American as the Alamo and apple pie. Square Dance Fantasy and Blues, alternating barn-dance rhythms with folksong-like charm, could have been close cousins with Samuel Barber’s Excursions. These works employed popular idioms unique to place and time.

The Native-American melody in Song of the Spirit-Dance, might well have also served as inspiration to those in Busoni’s Indian Diary. The two LaSalle students who performed the duet version of these sounded under-rehearsed, but the essence of the music was not lost.

Sharpley took to the keyboard himself in Prayer for Edith (2009), a touching lullaby written for a well-loved music teacher on her sickbed. Its soothing G major chords gently made its way to a reposeful E flat major.

Singaporean violinist Seah Huan Yuh (left) joined Sharpley in Ocean Song (1997), a meditation of extreme calm which had dream-like sequences filled with ethereal harmonics and arpeggios. The lyricism and song-like thread suggested that he has inherited the neo-Romantic mantle of great American composers such as Barber, Menotti and Rorem.

The contrasting two movements of Sharpley’s Second String Quartet (1995, revised in 2006) showed that he could be as spiky and ascerbic as Bartok, and yet possess the exuberance and humour of Bernstein. The quartet, led by Seah and including T’ang Quartet’s Leslie Tan, valiantly played through an ensemble of hammering and drilling, confirming that this promising new venue is all but concert-ready. A definitive performance will thus have to wait.

LaSalle's spanking new campus 

on McNally Street, but its 

concert venue is hardly ready!

Other signs that the auditorium is presently WOEFULLY INADEQUATE:

1. Lack of proper seating for concert performers.

2. Clueless stage-hands who did not know how to place seats and music stands.

3. Grand piano with castors that squeaked louder than a thousand mice in heat.

4. Complete lack of sound proofing

To add insult to injury, car-park charges were 5 cents a minute ($3 an hour). For goodness sake, THIS IS A F***ING SCHOOL, NOT THE ST.REGIS!

LaSalle's "concert hall" remains the WORST concert venue for classical music in Singapore. Little wonder nothing of consequence ever happens there.