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.

THE WAY NORTH / 92steel&guts / Review

THE WAY NORTH

92steel&guts

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (4 January 2015)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 6 January 2015 with the title "Violinist and pianist soar on Nordic trip".

92steel&guts is the name of a duo formed by young violinist Tang Tee Tong and pianist Wong Yun Qi, 92 being the sum of strings to be found on a piano and violin. Its concert debut attempted to add a new gloss to the tried and tested format of a chamber concert. Patrons were asked to register online, and enter the hall with a programme leaflet in hand, one specially designed to look like Facebook pages of the composers featured (below). They were also given the freedom of donating whatever they wished to defray the production costs.

Before the music began, an “inflight” announcement was made in English, Chinese and Malay (what, no Tamil?) as listeners embarked on a journey to the Nordic climes of the land of the first composer, the Norwegian nationalist Edvard Grieg. In semi-darkness, the voice of soprano Choy Siew Woon rang out from the left rear as she sang a collection of Norwegian folksongs collected by Grieg and his compatriot Johan Halvorsen.

The bucolic nature of these songs ranged from a yodelling-like number Kulok to the more rhythmic Springdans and Halling, the latter dance to be found in the finale of Grieg’s Piano Concerto. Tang’s violin from the right rear simulated the Hardanger fiddle, the folk instrument of village minstrels and bards which Grieg’s music popularised.

This rustic setting properly set up Grieg’s Third Violin Sonata in C minor, his most important essay in this medium. Alternating between darkness and light, Tang brought out the music’s movement and drama with a warm burnished tone, and no little agility. One only wished she did not stamp her foot so emphatically on the floor as she performed.

The slow movement was introduced by Wong’s excellent and responsive pianism, the resonance of which was highlighted by timely pedalling. The song-like atmosphere then broke out into a little dance, the spirit of which was multiplied manifold in the celebratory finale, which was both vigorous and nostalgic to its raucous end.

Contrary to the concert’s title, the flight changed course and headed southwards to Italy, with a rare performance of Ottorino Respighi’s Violin Sonata in B minor. Its virtuosic demands deter many, but champions have included Jascha Heifetz, Kyung-Wha Chung, Tasmin Little and now our Singaporean duo. Another darkly hewn work, Tang and Wong stewed in its late Romantic colours and subdued melodies with an impressive end result.

Again the central slow movement was beautifully rendered, from its quiet mysterious piano opening, with both hands in unison two octaves apart, and rising to a passionate and climactic effulgence. The finale was an unusually tricky Passacaglia, with rapid shifts in dynamics and multitudes of notes to tax both performers to the hilt.

There was to be no safety first measures, instead the duo went for broke, finishing with a stunning aplomb and an abruptness that caught the audience completely by surprise. Then the deserved applause rang out. There was to be no encore, but a return flight by 92steel&guts Airways will be a welcome prospect.    

Tang Tee Tong, Wong Yun Qi, Choy Siew Woon
(extreme right) and the production team.