HAPPY 340TH BIRTHDAY, J.S.BACH! / Soiree at Ying's with Red Dot Baroque

Happy Birthday, Papa Johann Sebastian Bach! 340 years ago, he was born in Eisenach, Thuringia on 21 March 1685, long before anyone had heard of Deutschland. What better way to celebrate his birthday than to organise a party bash with Singapore's foremost baroque group, Red Dot Baroque?

That was the idea of Huang Ying, Head of Culture, Press and Public Diplomacy at the German Embassy in Singapore, when she invited her Singapore and German friends to her lovely home in Katong for a Bach und Freunde soiree. Here are the photos from a most gemutlich evening through possible.

Ying introduces Red Dot Baroque
and violinist Alan Choo to her guests.

The musical evening opened with
J.S.Bach's Sonata No.4 in C minor (BWV.1017)

The opening movement uses the
same melody as Erbarme dich
from the St Matthew Passion.

From the living room to the dining area,
Leslie Tan introduces the baroque cello.

Leslie performs a work by
Italian composer Joseph Dell'Abaco and
the Prelude from JSB's Cello Suite No.1.

Christopher Clarke on theorbo
offers a Toccata by Alessando Piccinini. 

Brenda Koh performs Fantasia No.9
by Bach's best buddy Georg Philipp Telemann.

To close the concert was a dance work
by Giovanni Fontana.

Red Dot Baroque doing what they do best,
having musical fun.

Singapore Writers Festival director 
Yong Shu Hoong meets the Meyers.

Alan Choo chats with
Singapore Symphony Orchestra
CEO Kenneth Kwok

Germans and Singaporeans meet.

Lianhe Zaobao's Zhang Heyang with
Kenneth Kwok and soprano Alison Wong.

Red Dot Baroque's harpsichordist
Gerald Lim cuts the JSB birthday cake.

Informal music-making, with
Alan and Heyang playing J.S.Bach's
 Double Violin Concerto in D minor (BWV.1043)

Photo: Gerald Lim

They finally got a real keyboardist
to complete the concerto.

Alison served as the page-turner
for the 21st century tablet.
17th century tech at work.

The Air and Gavotte from
J.S.Bach's Suite No.3 in D major
as arranged by Max Reger.

That bag's not going anywhere near
Berlin Brandenberg Airport.

We had a great time, did you?

FRACTURED MIRRORS / Off-Menu / Review

 

FRACTURED MIRRORS 

Off-Menu 

Conservatory Concert Hall 

Thursday (6 February 2025) 

There is a new piano trio in town, and it's called Off-Menu. Formed by veterans of Singapore’s chamber music scene, it comprises violinist Yang Shuxiang (concertmaster of re:Sound), cellist Leslie Tan (founding member of T’ang Quartet and Red Dot Baroque) and pianist-composer Jonathan Shin, with the intention to specialise in off-beat repertoire and unusual juxtapositions of chamber music. 

Its concert debut opened with Shin’s Four Pictures of Mid-Winter Boston (2017), previously heard in a 2022 Concordia Piano Quartet concert. It sounded even better on this occasion, the neo-Impressionist tonal idiom coming across more vividly, beginning with a visage of snow in a quiet and atmospheric opening movement. 

What followed were two brief scherzo-like vignettes of morning rush-hour traffic and a snowstorm with Petrushka-like dissonances and glissandi. The final picture was mostly Yang’s show, with a beautiful extended solo that married the pentatonic world of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending with Paganinian arpeggios, before his partners returned for a placid close. This was Shin’s paean to New England solitude. 

The Singapore premiere of American-Russian composer Lera Auerbach’s Triptych – This Mirror Has Three Faces was next. The threesome explained its form as a kind of renaissance altarpiece formed by three folding blocs in five movements. The work recalled the polystylism of late Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, an anarchic mishmash involving modernist hair-pulling dissonances, neoclassical tropes, dance music and sentimental melody, all trapped within a carnival funhouse with distorting mirrors and prisms. 

Photo: Ong Shu Chen

That sounds wild but the trio brought out a very cohesive reading that repays relistening. One hopes this performance was recorded. Its individual movements were linked but the sense of dynamic changes taking place when one part segued into the next were well-defined. The piano intoned chime-like chords, a recurring feature, while screeching string dissonances endeavoured to find some resolution. 

There were moments of loud, violent rumbling turbulences, giving way to an off-kilter waltz where string pizzicatos were bounced off tipsy slurs and a frequent sliding between wide range of pitches. Wiry sul ponticello (bowing near the bridge) effects were de rigeuer, so were quasi-baroque exercises on the violin in the fourth movement, before the finale’s sickly sweet melody – a memorable one at that – dominated the proceedings before the work coming to a soft quizzical end. Had too many shots of vodka? This trio had that kind of effect. 

To prove that Off-Menu could still perform music of a more conventional kind, Schubert’s Piano Trio No.2 in E flat major (D.929) was programmed. This classic is scarcely esoteric, but how often does one hear it in concert? That is our loss because the late monumental work (almost 50 minutes in duration) is cut from the same congenial fabric as the better-known Trout Quintet. You won’t find a more perfect unison for the opening bars of the Allegro, in a reading of such cohesiveness that the camaraderie was palpable from the very first bar. The warmth in the strings perfectly complimented the piano’s scintillating running high notes, working to a passionate high in the development section. 

The Andante con moto second movement in C minor was a slow march (the sort that Schumann would later revel in) for which Tan’s cello had the most say. His theme would later figure prominently in the finale. It was typical of Schubert to have his weightiest material in the first two movements while take it easy later for the final two movements. The Scherzo contrasted a gemutlich opening canonic theme with a more martial sounding Trio, but the whole atmosphere was still congenial with the threesome lapping it up. 

The Rondo finale’s Allegro moderato was even lighter in feel, its Hungarian-flavoured melody (more subtle than usual) with the piano’s repeated notes (now sounding like a cimbalom) lighting up the proceedings. A welcome return of the slow movement’s cello theme now made more sense as its provenance was probably Hungarian as well. The interplay of both Magyar themes made this rather repetitious movement (with the trio performing the longer unedited version with 100 more bars) all the more absorbing. 

The joie de vivre displayed by Schubert in his final year made this music even more poignant, and this YST (Yang, Shin and Tan) Trio could not have made a more spirited maiden voyage with its inclusion. It is hoped that it won’t be too long before Off-Menu’s next concert.

Till we meet again,
for our next Off-Menu!

A FAURE FETE / AN EVENING WITH CHELSEA GUO / Review

 

YOUTH & SERENITY: 

A FAURE FETE

The Music Circle

TMC Studio, Queen’s Road

Saturday (15 July 2023)

 

AN EVENING 

WITH CHELSEA GUO

Chelsea Guo (Piano & Voice)

School of The Arts Concert Hall

Sunday (16 July 2023)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 19 July 2023 with the title "Engaging chamber concert and unusual piano-vocal recital at two weekend shows".

  

Two unusually different musical events took place last weekend, a chamber concert and a piano/vocal recital. The first saw about 50 people, including many children, packed within a cosy studio in The Music Circle’s school premises at Queen’s Road. This was an interactional concert meant to introduce young people (and their parents) to the joy of chamber music performance.

 

On show was a rare airing of late Romantic Frenchman Gabriel Fauré’s autumnal Piano Quintet No.2 in C minor (Op.115) performed by some of Singapore’s finest chamber musicians - pianist Cherie Khor, violinists Tang Tee Tong and Clarissa Lim, violist Christoven Tan and cellist Leslie Tan. Presenter Moegi Amano, a pianist herself, gave a short spiel on impressionism and Faure’s life history.

 

Strictly speaking, Fauré was not classed as an impressionist composer like Debussy or Ravel, but his more traditional music still provided instances where imaginations were allowed to run freely. As youngsters was busily colouring pictures of Eiffel Tower or pasting paper strips, the quintet performed as they would in a serious concert. In the flighty second movement, the audience was suggested to visualise children playing in a park, while the stillness of the slow movement reminded them of a peaceful river scene.

 

Applause between movements was not discouraged and all through this rarefied and sometimes austere music, many moments of beauty were illuminated, with listeners kept attentive and enraptured. Musical outreach has seldom been this engaging or unstuffy, and more schools are encouraged to win more followers to classical music by pursuing such persuasive means.   

 

Photo: Aceolution

The second concert featured one artist in dual roles of pianist and singer. While this is a given in pop music and jazz, it is virtually unheard of in classical music. Enter American-Chinese pianist and soprano Chelsea Guo, an undergraduate at New York’s Juilliard School, whose delightful programme centred on the love triangle of Robert Schumann, his wife Clara, and their friend Johannes Brahms.

 

The recital’s first half was all piano, opening with Robert’s Kinderszenen (Scenes From Childhood), musings on juvenile memories rather than didactic pieces for children. Innocence and simplicity were well brought out, the popular Traumerei (Dreaming) and the closing Der Dichter Spricht (The Poet Speaks) being particularly poignant.

 

Photo: Aceolution

Two contrasting Romances, Clara’s Op.21 No.1 and Robert’s Op.28 No.2, confirmed that she was no less of a serious composer than her husband. Brahms’ youthful Variations on an Original Theme (Op.21 No.1) provided the most technically challenging moments for the fingers but Guo prevailed.

 

 

The second half was all vocal, with Guo multi-tasking by being her own collaborative pianist. In Mir Klingt Ein Lied (In Me Sings A Song) is based on the melody of Chopin’s Tristesse Etude (Op.10 No.3) with the difficult bits left out, a mellifluous prelude to three songs by Clara which revealed far more of Guo’s art as interpreter. Her German was idiomatic, her tone pure but resolute, paving the way for Robert’s song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben (Woman’s Love and Life).

 

The words by Adelbert von Chamisso seem to modern sensibilities anachronistic and misogynist, that a woman is forever in the thrall of her man. It thus worked best just to pay attention to the music, and Guo expressed in its eight songs a wealth of emotion and colour, her voice never overshadowed by the piano’s rich details and textures. 

The recital closed with Robert’s Du Meine Seele (You My Soul), better known as Widmung (Dedication) written for Clara as a wedding gift, in the showy transcription by Franz Liszt. That heartrending romp and the Chinese song Molihua as encore brought down the house.