VERONA QUARTET IN RECITAL / THE VIOLA, CENTRESTAGE / Review

 

VERONA QUARTET IN RECITAL 

Conservatory Concert Hall 

Thursday (6 March 2025)

THE VIOLA, CENTRESTAGE 

DIYANG MEI, Viola 

with SSO musicians 

SSO Chamber Series 

Victoria Concert Hall 

Friday (7 March 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 10 March 2025 with the title "Sparkling chamber music treats from Verona Quartet and Diyang Mei".

Lovers of chamber music in Singapore have never had it this good. Two concerts in the past week showcased a variety of repertoire and distinguished by the quality of performances, all this being a prelude to the annual chamber music festival at the conservatory in the week to come. 

Photo: Jellal Koay

The Verona Quartet, based in Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio (United States), made a welcome return. Comprising Singapore violinist Jonathan Ong, violinist Dorothy Ro (Canada), violist Abigail Rojansky (USA) and cellist Jonathan Dormand (United Kingdom), the quartet celebrated French composer Maurice Ravel’s 150th birth anniversary with what came closest to the perfect reading of his String Quartet (1903) thought possible. 

Photo: Jellal Koay

They made the 20th century’s most-performed string quartet sound fresh and unhackneyed, distinguished by playing of finesse, precise intonation and tautness of ensemble. Its many lyrical lines had sweetness of tone, balanced by the vigorous execution of busy pizzicatos heard in the second movement. Its cyclical form saw the opening movement’s theme reappear in the third and fourth movements, heightening a sense of unity and nostalgia. 

Photo: Jellal Koay

Praised as a champion of contemporary music, the quartet gave the Singapore premiere of American composer of Jewish-Chinese-Peruvian heritage Gabriela Lena Frank’s Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout (2001). Its six short movements were inspired by native folk cultures of the Andes range, with simulation of local instruments such as panpipes and percussion, and the songs of funeral mourners and serenaders. The use of modern techniques was no impediment, the music being very accessible and even enjoyable, thus leaving an indelible impression. 

Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No.9 in E flat major (1964) deserves to be better known as it relived all the tropes that made the Soviet-era Russian composer famous. Dark and bitter melodies, dances of biting irony, and the spewing of vitriol came to the fore in its five connected movements. A more gripping or committed performance from the foursome would be hard to find. 

Responding to long and prolonged applause, encores of Mendelssohn (Canzonetta, from Op.12) and Duke Ellington (Cotton Club Stomp) were a further display of the quartet’s immense range. 

Viola virtuosos have long been overshadowed by their counterparts on violin and cello, however China-born Diyang Mei, principal violist of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra since 2022, might alter that perspective. He is a natural who breathes music and style with every move, and his 75-minute-long chamber concert, partnered by string players from the Singapore Symphony, attested to that. 

Posterity has Georg Philipp Telemann’s only Viola Concerto in G major (c.1720) as the first viola concerto ever composed. In four movements alternating between slow and fast, he coaxed a gorgeous svelte tone with none of the gutteral raspiness that often give violas a bad name.

The longest work on show was Franz Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata in A minor, originally written for the arpeggione, an obsolete fretted instrument from the viol family. Now often heard on the cello, Mei staked his claim for the viola, whose ravishing sound was ideal for its many song-like passages. Carl Maria von Weber’s Andante e Rondo Ongarese (Op.35) opened with the beauty of bel canto singing, then erupting into a rapturous Hungarian gypsy dance which brought down the house. 

Mei’s generous encores of Astor Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango followed by the traditional Mongolian melody Mu Ge (牧歌, Shepherd’s Song), joined by SSO violist Guan Qi in a sumptuously voiced arrangement, were a blast. This was a concert which would get youngsters clamouring to learn the viola.

NOVELETTES / SSO Chamber Series / Review

 

NOVELETTES 

SSO Chamber Series 

Victoria Concert Hall 

Thursday (9 January 2025)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 11 January 2025 with the title "SSO's chamber series showcases East European rarities in fun, tuneful evening".

The first classical concert of the year appeared more forbidding on paper than actual listening. Part of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra’s chamber series, the intriguing programme consisted wholly of rarities from Eastern Europe performed by members of the orchestra. The Suite for Two Violins (1943) by contemporary Polish composer Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969) opened the evening, from violinists Zhao Tian and Zhang Si Jing. 

Its seven movements, like a neoclassical suite of ancient dances, were surprisingly accessible for its time. Although peppered with mild dissonances which resolved without fuss, these miniatures alternating between fast and slow movements were unexpectedly tuneful. Zhao and Zhang worked like hand and glove, their clear-headed and polished readings were applauded by a sizeable and enthusiastic audience after each movement. 

Despite its title, there was ironically nothing new about the Five Novelettes (Op.15) for string quartet by the Russian Alexander Glazunov (1864-1936). This music, by the arch conservative who lived well into the 20th century, is closer in idiom to older composers like Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Alexander Borodin, with influences from Russian Orthodox chant and various orientalisms as well. 

Championed by the T’ang Quartet during the 1990s, the attractive music included approximations of Spanish dance music (the first movement is titled Alla Spagnuola), a vigorous tarantella (Orientale), a prayerful slow movement (Interludium in Modo Antico), an elegant Waltz and All’Ungherese. 

The closing movement saw first violinist Chan Yoong-Han scale treble heights in exotic melodies of possible Hungarian gypsy provenance. He was joined by Zhao, violist Marietta Ku and cellist Yu Jing for this sentimental wallow. 

Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857) was the father of Russian nationalist music, but there was little that was Russian in his Grand Sextet in E flat major (1832), which could have come from early Western European Romantics like Johann Hummel or Felix Mendelssohn. Its instrumental combination was similar to Franz Schubert’s Trout Quintet (except for an added violin), thus accounting for its tonal warmth and mellow sonorities. 

Almost hidden from view was pianist Low Shao Ying whose flashy and fussily filigreed part brilliantly dominated the proceedings. In the expansive and unabashedly tuneful opening movement, there were also juicy melodies from cellist Guo Hao and violist Luo Biao who were unafraid to announce their presence. Violinists Jin Li and Zhao, and bassist Karen Yeo completed the well-balanced ensemble. 

The central slow movement was classic bel canto, with a mellifluous aria-like theme sung by the strings over simple accompaniment. The association with Italian opera composers Gaetano Donizetti and Vincenzo Bellini was unmistakable, as was a nocturne-like atmosphere reminiscent of pianist-composers John Field and Frederic Chopin. 

Its magical spell was uninterrupted by applause as it segued into a joyous Allegro con spirito finale which was pure and unadulterated fun. Chamber music, as they say, may be summed up as Res severa verum gaudium or Pleasure is serious business.

LOVE FOR FRENCH MUSIC / OF WAR & PEACE / SSO Chamber Series & T'ang Quartet / Review

 

A LOVE OF FRENCH MUSIC 

SSO Chamber Series 

Victoria Concert Hall 

Thursday (3 October 2024)

OF WAR AND PEACE 

T’ang Quartet 

The Arts House Chamber 

Sunday (6 October 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 8 October 2024 with the title "Rarities aired at SSO's chamber series and T'ang Quartet's concerts".

It is always refreshing to see unfamiliar works of music programmed alongside more popular numbers of the classical canon. A pair of chamber concerts demonstrated that good programming will invariably be reciprocated by very encouraging audience response. 

The first concert was part of an all-French two-nighter presented by musicians of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. Camille Saint-Saens’ Fantaisie for violin and harp in A major (Op.124) is virtually unknown outside of harp circles, a late work of melodic invention and charm. 

Gulnara Mashurova’s harp was the anchor, providing steady accompaniment with the lightness and transparency of timbre that a piano could never replicate. Over this, Zhao Tian’s violin had most of the lyrical passages, later turning into outright display. In their hands, the music never descended into empty fireworks or frivolity. 

Receiving a local premiere was Bernard Andres’ Chants d’arriere-saison (Songs of a Season Past), unusually scored for French horn and harp. Its seven short movements could have posed serious issues of balance, but principal hornist Austin Larson’s tonal control was exemplary. 

He produced a wealth of colour and nuance, his excellent intonation also complemented by the harp’s varied textures. The music was Romantic in idiom and accessibly tonal, with autumnal and melancholic being predominant moods that was well worth listening to again. 

The evening was completed by Maurice Ravel’s popular String Quartet in F major, with Zhao and Zhang Sijing on violins with violist Janice Tsai and cellist Christopher Mui. Despite the foursome playing together for the first time, the result was a taut reading which lacked nothing in poetry and rhythmic vitality. 

The Scherzo with its pizzicatos and pentatonics relived the gamelan’s percussive clangour, and found a canny visual resonance with violinist Zhao’s batik outfit. 

T’ang Quartet, Singapore’s longest existing professional chamber group, also presented a programme of rarities. Founding members Ng Yu Ying and Ang Chek Meng on violins were joined by two young guests players, violist Patcharaphan Khumprakob and cellist Cho Hang-oh. Both were alumni of Yong Siew Toh Conservatory where the original quartet is resident. 

Alexander Borodin’s First String Quartet in A major is far less popular than its successor, but got a fresh and invigorating reading it deserved. Ng and Ang’s vast experience must have indelibly rubbed on their former students as this foursome performed like a well-seasoned outfit. The rapt slow introduction was ear-catching in its voicing and precision, then giving way to the opening movement’s flowing main theme which quoted a late Beethoven quartet. 

No self-respecting string quartet would omit fugal writing, and the obligatory counterpoint in three movements was well-handled. The Scherzo’s prestidigitation was impressive, as was the mastery of syncopation and dotted rhythms of the furious finale. 

The all-Russian evening’s gripping tour de force was Dmitri Shostakovich’s Third String Quartet in F major, composed shortly after the end of World War Two. T’ang’s forte has always been Slavic music and this was right up its alley. The first movement’s irony and mock gaiety wore a poker-face throughout, later giving way to the slashings of the second movement’s demented waltz. 

Horrors and brutality of war were laid bare in the third movement, which must have given ideas to Bernard Herrmann’s film score for Psycho. A humanising voice would emerge in the slow movement’s moving passacaglia, and later in the finale’s Jewish-influenced dance. The audience held its collective breath at the work’s quiet end before erupting in vociferous applause.

Landmark: This was my 2600th article 

for The Straits Times.

BORODIN QUARTET - ELEGY & EPILOGUE / Review

BORODIN QUARTET – ELEGY

BORODIN QUARTET – EPILOGUE

Victoria Concert Hall

Saturday & Sunday 

(13 & 14 October 2018)

This review was published in  The Straits Times on 16 October 2018 with the title "A full measure of what chamber music is about".

Longevity is the enduring quality of Russia’s Borodin Quartet, founded in 1945 and still going strong for over 70 years. Its players have come and gone, with the last founding member cellist Valentin Berlinsky retiring in 2007. Of the Borodin Quartet that last performed in Singapore in 1996, only violist Igor Naidin remains.

Its two concerts, part of the SSO Chamber and VCH Presents series, gave listeners the full measure of what chamber music was all about. Three of its members partnered with Singapore Symphony Orchestra players for two popular quintets on the first evening. Violist Naidin and cellist Vladimir Balshin were joined by violinists Chan Yoong Han and Chikako Sasaki and cellist Ng Pei-Sian for Schubert’s late String Quintet in C major.

Despite the “heavenly length” of nearly 55 minutes, it was a superbly paced performance that breathed freshness, revealing the intimacy of close cooperation all through its four movements. There was nothing to separate Russians and locals in the seamless music-making, from the opening movements’ lyrical musings to more vigorous exertions of the Scherzo and Rondo finale.

Oneness of ensemble also inhabited Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor, where violinist Sergei Lomovsky and violist Naidin played alongside pianist Lim Yan, violinist Margit Saur and cellist Wang Yan. In this music of emotional and dynamic extremes, the temptation to lapse into caricature was resisted. While playing the score straight, the result was a catharsis borne of extreme duress while keeping a straight face. This irony was clearly appreciated by the audience.     

The Borodin Quartet, led by first violinist Ruben Aharonian, was on its own in the second concert, which presented diametrically contrasting halves. Musical sunshine lit up Tchaikovsky’s First String Quartet, with its very familiar Andante Cantabile slow movement, where Aharonian’s melodic line soaring above quiet pizzicatos from Balshin’s cello could not have been more tender.

The rest of the work showcased immaculate ensemble, sensitive to myriads of nuances, and finely balanced by an understated virtuosity. The four players could easily have played this, their musical heritage, blind-folded. Hugo Wolf’s brief and jolly Italian Serenade, filled with Mediterranean warmth, was served like an enjoyable encore.

Dmitri Shostakovich with the
original members of the Borodin Quartet

A sugar-coated first half would scarcely have prepared one for the bile of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No.15, his final embittered work in this medium. The hall was plunged into near darkness, with the players barely visible through dim lights illuminating their scores. This seemed like the only way to experience the work’s six continuous slow movements, highlighted by painful pauses, pregnant silences and interjected dissonances. One could hear a pin drop amid this blanket of unnerving stillness and unease, so grippingly negotiated by the quartet.

There was nearly a minute of silence before house lights came on with the ensuing applause. Two short Tchaikovsky encores seemed trite and inconsequential, as all present knew all through the music’s unremitting bleakness, they had attended a requiem.     

SSO violinist Chan Yoong Han
and his daughter Chantal meet the Borodins.

SSO violinist Chikako Sasaki
is ecstatic she got to play with the legendary quartet.

The Borodin Quartet also performs at 
The Joy of Music Festival 2018 
Hong Kong

Wednesday (17 October 2018):
Tchaikovsky String Quartet No.1
Wolf Italian Serenade
Shostakovich String Quartet No.15

Friday (19 October 2018):
Haydn String Quartet Op.33 No.1
Shostakovich String Quartet No.9
Shostakovich Piano Quintet
(with Ilya Rashkovskiy, Piano)

8 pm, City Hall Concert Hall
Tickets available at URBTIX
https://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/CulturalService/Programme/en/music/programs_620.html

MAHLER'S FOURTH / Singapore Symphony Orchestra Chamber Series / Review

MAHLER’S FOURTH

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

SOTA Concert Hall

Sunday (30 March 2014)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 1 April 2014 with the title "Fresh twist to Mahler favourites".

Just three days before, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra had performed Arnold Schoenberg’s grandiloquent transcription of Brahms’s First Piano Quartet for large orchestra under the baton of Chinese conductor Yu Long. This afternoon, the reverse arrangement took place with Erwin Stein’s chamber version of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony by the same forces.

The inspiration was again Schoenberg’s, under the aegis of his Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna which ran subscription concerts of new music for select members of the establishment. Stein was Schoenberg’s student, and his 1921 arrangement was to shrink the orchestra to its bare bones without losing the spirit of the original.

The Fourth Symphony (1900) was Mahler’s shortest, lightest and least bombastic symphony, thus amenable to “downsizing”. Just eight string players (five violins, one each of viola, cello and bass), three woodwinds, two percussionists, piano and harmonium were assembled for this Singapore premiere, involving the orchestra’s principal musicians.

Despite the diminution of size, this was not “Mahler lite”, but a fresh way of re-listening to an old favourite. The chirpy repeated woodwind chords at its opening were replaced by the piano but the rustic tinkling of sleigh bells remained. Textures became more transparent, often with just one instrument to a part, and there was to be no room for error.

On this front, the accuracy and quality of solo playing was never in doubt. Tempos were no swifter, although a further degree of lightness could have been expected in certain passages. The allusion in the first movement to the opening trumpet theme of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony could have also been better delineated.

Guest concertmaster Lu Wei artfully alternated between two violins (including one tuned one tone higher) in the Scherzo to simulate “Friend Death fiddling” in a macabre dance, the kind of grotesquery Mahler was so fond of. The sinister effect juxtaposed with the beguiling sentimentality of the Landler (country dance) rhythm lent the feel of the ironic, hence was intentionally unsettling.

The expansive slow movement revealed more strengths of the playing, with Ng Pei Sian’s cello accompanied by Guennadi Mouzyka’s bass leading a succession of lovely solos, including Zhang Zhen Shan’s violin and Pan Yun’s oboe. The gradual build up to the impassioned climax yielded just about the concert’s best moments.

Without a break, the finale opened with Chinese soprano Rao Lan striding on to sing Das Himmlischer Leben (The Heavenly Life), a child’s vision of paradise and its imagined delights. Her German was idiomatic and well-enunciated, and demeanour playful and suitably childlike. The only Mahler’s symphony to end quietly and cheerfully, there was a healthy pause of silence before the ensuing applause. Here was clearly a keyed-in and respectful audience, possibly the best one the music could hope for. 

SSO CONCERT:THE BEAUTY OF THE BAROQUE II / Review

THE BEAUTY OF THE BAROQUE II

Singapore Symphony Orchestra Chamber Series

Esplanade Concert Hall

Sunday (28 April 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 30 April 2013 with the title "Charmed by early music".

It is always refreshing to witness the Singapore Symphony Orchestra performing early music conceived on a small scale. Several weeks ago, Christopher Hogwood conducted the orchestra in a sparkling evening of Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn built around a Turkish theme. The revelation was that the orchestra of modern instruments, not usually accustomed to period performance practice, could adapt so well to the idiom.

The pair of baroque concerts led by violinist Peter Hanson (left), who has decades of experience working in “authentic” instrumental groups, would be equally absorbing. The orchestra was split into two separate small ensembles, each playing a different programme. A mix of popular and lesser known works also minimised the curse of the familiar.

Sunday afternoon opened with two concerti grosso, the predominant form for baroque ensembles that was later supplanted by the symphony. Arcangelo Corelli (right), the violin virtuoso that he was, ensured that the solo violinists Hanson, Lynnette Seah and cellist Ng Pei Sian were kept busy in his Concerto Grosso in D major (Op.6 No.4).

Two oboists and a bassoonist joined the strings for the five movements of Handel’s Concerto Grosso in D minor (Op.3 No.5), adding a different colour to the group. Despite the vastness of the hall, the very clear textures and immaculate sound came across with much vividness and not a little reverberation. What was lacking was a sense of intimacy, which will be fixed when Victoria Concert Hall reopens in 2014.

The most curious work of the concert was Georg Philipp Telemann’s 8-movement Suite called The Nations, composed for the 18^th century equivalent of a World Expo in Hamburg. Each of its quirkily scored dances paid tribute to the countries represented; vigorous and rhythmic for The Turks, alternating slow and fast for The Swiss, and bell-like sonorities produced by bass and cello ostinatos for The Muscovites. Charming.

The last two works of the 80-minute concert were the best known. Yet it was a pleasant surprise to see only 11 players in Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto – three each of violins, violas and cellos, one bass and a harpsichord. Light and buoyant, but never thin, was the result. Hanson’s improvised solo was a delight, leading up the central movement’s two obligatory chords before the finale’s joyous counterpoint at full speed.

The concert closed with Vivaldi’s popular Concerto for Four Violins in B minor, where Hanson was joined by SSO violinists Jin Li, Cindy Lee and Ye Lin. The teamwork was impeccable, with each player’s solos gratefully lapped up and complemented, and the general ensemble supporting at full tilt. Acknowledging the eager applause, the finale was encored. Let us have more of such concerts again soon.