VIOLIN AND PIANO DUO CONCERT / TASMIN LITTLE & MARY WU / Review

VIOLIN & PIANO DUO RECITAL

TASMIN LITTLE, Violin

& MARY WU, Piano

City Hall Concert Hall, Hong Kong

Sunday (25 June 2017)

It is a short distance between Shenzhen and Hong Kong, such that I was able to hop over the China-Hong Kong boundary to spend a couple of days in Hong Kong – to shop, eat and listen to more music. After four nights of relentless piano concertos at the Shenzhen International Piano Competition finals, it came as a relief to hear the solo violin again. The source was the great British violinist Tasmin Little herself, partnered by her former schoolmate and good friend, the Hong Kong pianist Mary Wu.

To refer to Tasmin Little as a virtuoso would be an understatement. Her many recordings through the years (on the EMI labels, Decca and now Chandos) attest to her musicianship and versatility, and it was a pleasure to hear her in a full-length recital rather than just in concertos. The evening opened with the short Scherzo in C minor by Brahms, part of the multi-composer F.A.E. Sonata written for Joseph Joachim, which yielded a fiery response from both violinist and pianist.

This was the appetiser for Schubert’s lovely Sonata (or Sonatina, as it is sometimes known) in D major D.384 which was a lyrical balm for the ears. Here is the Lieder composer at his most congenial, aided by Little’s sweet and lovely tone in its three movements. Never too cloying or over-sentimental, the singing tone was what one would expect in this most effable of chamber music.

This was contrasted with the impressionist textures of Frederick Delius’ Second Sonata, a work championed by Little and which she recorded with Piers Lane on the Conifer label during the 1990s. The shortest of four sonatas, it swept through breezily in a single movement, revealing sumptuous melodies and harmonies. There was an element of folk and dance music, playfully captured before closing in the comfortable home key of C major.    

Both Little and Wu had solo works on their own. During the first half, Mary performed Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse, a reading that dazzled in its play of colour and light, revelling in a glorious climax before a truly joyous close. Tasmin’s arrangement (with her friend Rachel Jennings) of Albeniz’s Asturias was just as stunning. Despite its repetitious figurations and rhythms, it traversed through an entire gamut of mostly jaw-dropping technical tricks.

The concert proper closed with a masterful account of Cesar Franck’s popular Sonata in A major. As with the earlier works, Little’s mellifluous voice impressed in the static beauty of the slower first and third movements. This was backed by Wu’s impressive pianism, not least in the treacherously difficult second movement’s thrills and spills. The finale’s canon was a thing of beauty, its simple theme first heard on the piano and repeated on the violin, building to an impassioned climax and rapturous close.  

The audience was treated to four encores from the duo. Following two of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances, the peach was Lili Boulanger’s utterly beautiful Nocturne, a work that deserves to be heard over and over again. Following that, William Kroll’s playful Banjo and Fiddle provided the icing on the cake. My stopover in Hong Kong was well-rewarded indeed. 

Review of MARY WU'S PIANO RECITAL by The Straits Times reviewer Albert Lin

Published in Life! on 27 August 2013.

Photos from MARY WU'S PIANO RECITAL

The Hong Kong pianist MARY MEI-LOC WU was the second pianist to be featured in The Asian Pianist Recital Series presented by Singapore Conference Hall. Her piano recital took place on Sunday 25 August 2013, and she performed works by Bach-Busoni, Ravel, Gershwin, Chopin, Bright Sheng, Zhou Long, Victor Chan and Joyce Tang. A requisite of this series is that pianists must perform music from their country of origin. On this occasion, Mary performed pieces from four Chinese composers, which include two composers from Hong Kong. Needless to say, all these performances were Singapore premieres, while Images, Colours by Joyce Tang was a World Premiere. 

The recital was preceded by a pre-concert talk by local music historian Phan Ming Yen on the subject of The Rise of the Asian Pianist. Always interesting and thought-provoking, he suggested that the higher profile Asian pianists assume on the world stage today might be due to Western classical music seeking a new market in Asia, with the rise of the middle classes in the nations of the Far East. He introduced some interesting but lesser known Asian pianists who made their name in the 1950s and 60s, such as the Japanese Kiyoko Tanaka and Chinese Liu Shih Kun, by some rare recordings. He also intimated that great Asian pianists had existed 50 years ago, and may even be better than the current high profile lot represented by Lang Lang and Yundi.  

A rapt audience listening to some historical Asian piano recordings.

Mary's recital opened at 7 pm with a performance of the Bach-Busoni chorale prelude Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christe.  This was followed by a stunning reading of Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit. Notice how Singapore Conference Hall uses different projections to accompany the various works. These were not chosen in conjunction with the ongoing Singapore Night Festival!

The four Chinese works performed were Bright Sheng's My Song, Victor Chan's Passion Within (inspired by the aftermath of the 2003 SARS tragedy in Hong Kong), Zhou Long's Wu Kui (Hunter's Dance) and Joyce Tang's  Images, Colours. In certain ways, these were the most interesting works because some of the Chinese idioms and rhythms used showed a shared heritage with the better known scores of Bartok and Ginastera. Chan's piece had even a New Age and gospel sensibility to it, while Tang's three-movement work, dedicated to Mary Wu, was impressionistic. All the works were tonal and very accessible.

Pastel blue, with no moving images, was used as the backdrop for
Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, naturally! Fortunately this was
the same setting used for Chopin's Third Sonata.

Despite the small audience, Mary Wu's recital was very well received, and she performed two encores, Albeniz's Evocacion from Iberia Book 1, and I Got Rhythm from The Gershwin Songbook.

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More work after the recital,
signing autographs!

Mary Wu meets with Azariah Tan,
who performs in the next recital
on 1 September 2013, and members
of The Asian Pianist artistic team.

SOME WORDS with Hong Kong pianist MARY MEI-LOC WU

Hong Kong pianist MARY WU gives her first piano recital in Singapore as part of The Asian Pianist Recital Series at the Singapore Conference Hall on Sunday 25 August 2013 at 7 pm. Her very exciting programme includes Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit, Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, Chopin's Third Sonata and works by four Chinese composers, Zhou Long, Bright Sheng, Victor Chan and Joyce Tang. PIANOMANIA is chuffed to catch up with this remarkable and totally personable artist. 

Welcome to Singapore, and it must be daunting to be the first international artist featured in The Asian Pianist Recital Series. You have offered a very varied and eclectic selection of piano repertoire for your recital.

Thank you so much for the invitation. It is my privilege indeed to be here to have this occasion to share some of my absolute favourite music with all of you! Each piece is like a personal song without words from my heart, from Europe (Germany, Poland and France), America (Gershwin) and Asia (China and Hong Kong). Some are inspired by poetry, like Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit. Some are inspired by states of mind and vivid images, such Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Joyce Tang’s Splashes and Zhou Long’s Hunters' Dance. I hope there is something for everyone to enjoy.

Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit is the second work in your recital. You were a student of the legendary Vlado Perlemuter, who himself was a student and personal friend of the composer. What insights did he impart to you in the interpretation of this fiendish masterpiece?

Perlemuter worked on the imagination a lot and encouraged me to look into the poems and sense the atmosphere, the possibility of images expressed in certain musical parts. Surprisingly though, he always emphasized how much Ravel preferred to let the music speak itself rather than putting too much freedom into the music. That is always a delicate and difficult balance, something which one comes to terms with and keeps searching for after many years. The balance is difficult because the poems themselves are rhapsodic and illusionary, especially in Scarbo, the final movement which is portrayed as the ever changing being, sometimes mischievous, sometimes horrific, and always mysterious! To be honest, I have been blessed with many great teachers, whose greatness I did not appreciate enough until I looked back as the years passed.

Maurice Ravel at the piano,
with George Gershwin standing at extreme right.

It was Ravel who admitted and joked that he could take lessons from George Gershwin on how to make money! Was this the reason for including Rhapsody in Blue in your programme? More seriously, it is the rhythmic elements and interesting harmonies that unite and separate these works that is intriguing, is it not?

Ha ha! Ravel was in a way kind to refuse giving lessons to Gershwin for fear of the American deviating from his own individual style. Ravel loved jazz, just as Gershwin did, as you can see in this music. The Rhapsody was originally written for big band and piano, and played by Gershwin himself. The sunny rhythmic and harmonic elements are his forté and they always sound so fresh. As for Ravel, his harmonies and rhythms sound much more modern than Gershwin's, even though his pieces were written earlier. Harmonically, he sometimes uses similar jazz-chord formations but put in a much more traditional form that they sound otherworldly.

Chopin is ubiquitous for most piano recitals. The Third Sonata in B minor Op.58 is one of his greatest works. How does one make this overplayed and all-too-familiar music sound fresh and invigorating?

The reason why the Sonata is played so often is because it is such great music. With every great work, one discovers something new every time. Arthur Rubinstein was once asked, after playing Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu 66 times as an encore, "Don't you find it very boring to play this again?" His reply was," Why boring? Every time I play it, it is like seeing a new leaf grow on a tree, fresh and novel," or something to that effect. So in the similar psyché, reliving the progress of a piece, like retelling a story, can be different and exciting each time.

One of the pre-requisites of The Asian Pianist series is to perform music of Asian composers. You have selected not one, not two, but four Chinese works, and all Singaporean premieres. Zhou Long and Bright Sheng, both now based in USA, are fairly well-known names, but not necessarily for piano music. What are their pieces like?

I came across Zhou Long’s and Bright Sheng’s pieces more than twenty years ago first in America and then more recently in Hong Kong. In discussions, I see that these are personal statements of each composer. Zhou relived his unforgettable experiences in Manchuria and Beijing in Hunter's Dance (Wu Kui), while Sheng wrote My Song with an inner voice that he found in himself.

Stylistically they are very different. Zhou's dance is based on three notes, used in all different ways throughout the piece. He mentioned how much he regarded the piano as a percussive instrument and incorporated the Chinese instruments such as the guzheng and pipa sounds in the music. What impressed me most was its middle section. It was for him the memory of seeing, while farming in the fields, fire suddenly break out in a forest, and how herds of deer panted and ran for their lives. It is a very dramatic piece. Incidentally, Zhou Long was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for composition last year.

Sheng's My Song is in four movements: slow, fast, fast and slow. These are like photographs of state of minds: living in the past (a romantic-sounding melody from Qinghai), joyfulness set in a folk dance, a metamorphosis of a simple two-note motif (transforming from mysterious to bombastic) and the last, a nostalgic retrospection.

About the Hong Kong composers, Victor Chan’s Passion Within came about as a response to the 2003 SARS tragedy that almost paralysed Hong Kong and Asia. How does that translate to music?

The very fact that he wrote it just after the fearful and emotional siege of the city, where everybody's lives, rich or poor, was on the line (and some failed to make it through), meant that there is some kind of struggling resolution and relief in the music. The piece is perhaps the most Romantic in style of the four Chinese works. There are many questioning moments, statements of anxiety and sighs. However these are interspersed with really relaxed music, sometimes even salon-like improvisations, casual and free.

We are honoured that you have chosen Singapore to be venue for the World Premiere of Joyce Tang’s Images, Colours, which was dedicated to you. The title of this 3-movement work sounds impressionist, and how does the music move you?

The music is simple yet captivating, especially the first two movements. The Flowing Streams and Song of Crystal Light suggest a transparent texture, and yet the momentum and pace sees choreography and flow to these elegant dance-like pieces. The third piece Splashes is the newest movement. The style is a lot bolder, and if it were calligraphy, the strokes are thicker and perhaps more predictable. It incorporates some Spanish rhythms, some improvisational moments as well as special chosen scales.

Q: The art of the piano recital is in some risk of dying out, judging by concert attendances around the work (excepting events by Lang Lang and Yundi, which have a popstar aura about them). What can artists do to keep this hallowed tradition alive?

Piano music is part of art that is food for the soul, and a transcendental means to reaching another dimension of being. Many popular composers such as Bach and Beethoven strived to attain that. It is certainly not dying out in Hong Kong. Here, and in China, students now learn music and instruments at an early age. They also play and sometimes compete in annual music festivals. Some are required to write concert reports and reviews. There are also many more talks about music, pre- and post-concert discussions. There are many returnees from universities overseas and many international level concerts are created. The atmosphere is pretty vibrant and great musicians are welcomed for their art whatever the repertoire. Government funding is certainly playing a big part in this development.

Ultimately, it is up to the individual to persevere and sustain their choice of passion, and the teachers and educators can help to guide their students to appreciate music more and discover the treasures to enrich their lives.

Did you know that the title of your recital RESPLENDANT HARMONIES was a rough translation of your Chinese name Mei Loc, which essentially means "beautiful music" in Cantonese?

I think that my father must have had fun playing a pun with our names. All five daughters have Loc has our second character-name (San Loc, Gar Loc et al). He loved music but was not allowed to take it as a first study, instead he was made to study Law.

As you know, the Cantonese word loc means “happiness”, and when pronounced ngog, means “music”. So he hoped we would find both happiness and also music in our lives, I think! He also avoided using Ng in our Cantonese surname, and adopted the Mandarin version Wu instead, just as he would avoid ngog. This is so that our names would be more easily pronounced by people. [Mary’s name would have been Ng Mei Ngoc if Cantonese was strictly enforced!] At that time, my oldest sister was named Enloc (which means grace and happiness, or grace and music), when she was born in Shanghai. The rest of us, born in Hong Kong, just followed suit!

MARY WU PLAYS RAVEL / Review

RAVEL Piano Works
MARY WU, Piano
Universal Music 442 880-6
2 CDs / TT: 65’39”, 65’57”

Hong Kong might seem an unusual source for a recording of Maurice Ravel’s piano music, but it is the hometown of Chinese pianist Mary Mei Loc Wu who studied with the great French-Lithuanian pianist Vlado Perlemuter (1904-2002, himself a student of Ravel) at the Yehudi Menuhin School and privately. This set does not pretend to be the complete piano works (La Valse and the two-handed version of the Mother Goose Suite are absent) but includes the major works and a couple of extras.

Comparisons with Perlemuter’s Ravel recordings (on two Nimbus CDs, recorded in the 1980s) are inevitable and Wu comes across very favourably. That is not because of Perlemuter’s extreme age (he was sight-impaired and pushing 80) and Wu’s relative youth (she is in her late 30s or early 40s), but rather Wu shares his genuine and authentic feeling for this music. Both are instinctive musicians with a penchant for the sensuous rather than fire-breathing gladiators, and this serves the music to a tee.

Wu is equally comfortable in both the impressionistic as well as structured and “antique” forms in which Ravel chose to write in. In the former category, the fearsome Gaspard de la nuit holds little terrors for her. Her Ondine is beguiling, seductive and very much capable of casting curses. There is much atmosphere in Le Gibet with the droll tolling of a distant church-bell as doleful accompaniment. Wu’s very well-paced Scarbo takes a half-minute longer than Perlemuter’s, but there is never the feeling of drag. The coruscating climaxes still arrive and resound with the same vehemence and malevolence. The CD booklet helpfully contains Aloysius Bertrand’s poems as well as an English translation.

In Miroirs, images and scenes are conjured through the Ravel’s inimitable writing, no better illustrated in the watery realm of Une barque sur l’ocean, where gentle lapping waves soon takes on the violence of a mini squall. Wu combines the sensitivity of a supreme colourist with freewheeling virtuosity. Whether evoking the flitting of moths (Noctuelles) and birdsong (Oiseaux tristes), delicately balancing six sets of bells in La Vallée des Cloches, or jesting irrepressibly in Alborada del gracioso, all these fall comfortably within her hands. In this company, the playing fountains of Jeux d’eau, a work of Lisztian inspiration, are indelibly captured.

Mary Wu with her teacher 

Vlado Perlemuter in 2001.

Valses nobles et sentimentales are handled with just the right touch of whimsy and nostalgia, and there is little to separate her account with Perlemuter’s. The most elusive (but sublime) dance is the eighth and final one, where whiffs and fragments of the earlier waltzes appear and disappear like a mirage over a misty landscape. Wu shades this with much beauty and colour.

The pendant of “antique” dances of La Tombeau de Couperin (each dedicated to Ravel’s friends killed in the Great War) flow with purpose and great clarity, beginning with the fluid Prélude and Fugue. The latter does not sound like an academic exercise in Wu’s hands. Her handling of the ensuing Forlane, Rigaudon and Menuet also ensures a variety of colours and moods. Lightness of touch and lightning reflexes distinguish the final Toccata, where others are satisfied with rumbling along. The familiar Pavane pour une infante defunte is lovingly crafted, with wistfulness and gravitas brought out in equal measure.

The usual miniatures have been included. The two pastiches after Borodin and Chabrier are slight but exude a period charm, while the two minuets (Menuet antique and Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn) are a delightful combination of simplicity and formality. Not the most taxing or profound of music, but played lovingly.

The extras not found in the Perlemuter set are interesting if not vital. The early Serenade grotesque of 1893 (Ravel’s own shabby little shocker à la Bartok’s Allegro barbaro) is amusing for its simulation of a guitar but could have sounded more grotesque than its title suggests. The Piece en forme de Habañera, originally a vocal work, is totally entrancing in Maurice Dumesnil’s transcription.

At budget price (retailing at about HKD 110, just under SGD 20), this is a wholly recommendable set which compares well with the more established names in the field. I can think of only one other Asian pianist to have covered this repertoire; Kun Woo Paik’s set on Dante is no longer available. The Perlemuter set is equally hard to find, but licensed pressings from China (with programme notes in Chinese) at budget price may be found in East Asia.

For the most “complete” set of Ravel solo works, look to Joel-François Thiollier on Naxos, which includes La Valse and the early but rambling La Parade (not vintage Ravel). Pascal Rogé’s budget set on Double Decca has the four-hands version (with Denise-Françoise Rogé) of Mother Goose Suite. However one will not find the lovely Habañera in either of these sets.