QUARTET FOR THE REBIRTH OF TIME / TO Ensemble / Review

 

EOS / LAND WITH NO SUN IV:

QUARTET FOR THE REBIRTH OF TIME

TO Ensemble

Esplanade Recital Studio

Saturday (19 September 2026)

From its title, it may appear that TO Ensemble’s latest concert had taken a leaf from Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. After all, their combination of pianist, two string players and a wind player was a similar configuration as the Frenchman’s famous quartet (piano, violin, cello and clarinet) that performed in Stalag VIIIA prisoner-of-war camp in Gorlitz on 15 January 1941. Instead of the doom and gloom faced by the French foursome in WWII, jazz pianist Tze Toh’s Quartet for the Rebirth of Time (Quatuor pour la renaissance du temps if you will), original music with improvisations, represented renewal and hope for the future.

Joined by Wu Bingling (violin), Lazar T.Sebastine (Carnatic violin) and Teo Boon Chye (saxophone), the quartet like Messiaen’s performed the concert's ten movements in various instrumental combinations. The first three movements saw each of the instruments being introduced with Tze’s piano. Slow piano chords in A flat minor opened [Darkness] Obscurita, with Bingling’s violin singing a song of nostalgia. Teo’s sax playing in D flat major was ushered in [Hope] Land With No Sun Theme before a raga from Lazar’s Carnatic violin became the basis of [Reset] Begin (Again) / Gambiranatta.

All four were heard together for the first time in [Overload] Hyperloop, with both violins racing each other in a perpetual motion in A minor, before sax joins the fray, before ending abruptly in a startling halt. [Disconnect] Suspension was the most dissonant movement, with hazy piano chords matching the PSI over Esplanade while the grinding tones from violin and sax were being extracted.

[Love] A Chance Of Love in D major was Tze’s tribute to the melodies of Ennio Morricone, with both violins expressing varying degrees of sadness and regret in some of the concert’s loveliest music. In [Time] Child’s Play, now centred in G major, a beat tapped out by strings and sax provided a constant pulse for a number resembling classic tropes of minimalism.

By this time, the quartet was truly in the zone with G major being firmly ensconced as the definitive tonal centre. [Morning] Mornings, first heard on sax, was a melody that could go on forever, made even more beautiful with the Carnatic violin entering. This was the dawn that refreshes the night, and what followed, [Rebirth] Rebirth was exactly what was referred to in the concert’s title. 

This was the concert’s longest movement, its kinetic beat resonating in a rhythmic dance that had gospel vibes about it. This is exactly the kind of ecstatic music which hysterical congregations in full gospel evangelical churches used to go into trances and speak / sing / rage in tongues. Pure opium for the holy spirit or whatever possessed them.

Having overshot their time, TO Ensemble’s final number [New Dawn] Dawn / Procession was short-winded, its brief minutes representing the endless parade a group such as theirs could go on if given the time and chance. The invigorating end to a 75-minute concert was greeted with prolonged applause, followed by a lively post-concert chat which showed that Tze and his gang had won over many converts. Long may that continue.

QUANTUM STATE / TO Ensemble / Review

 

QUANTUM STATE

TO Ensemble

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (1 March 2026)

This review was published on 3 March 2026 with the title "TO Ensemble explores what humans are made of in entertaining programme".

Concerts by TO Ensemble have traditionally been founded on futuristic stories. Dystopian worlds, interstellar travel and speculative fiction are par for the course, but its latest offering was more down to earth: science and what we are composed of.

Led by composer and jazz pianist Tze Toh, his quartet on this occasion was formed by Wu Bingling (violin), Lazar T. Sebastine (Carnatic violin) and Teo Boon Chye (alto saxophone), performing an enjoyable 75-minute concert without intermission. Within this configuration, the players and their instruments represented respectively space, humanity, nature and science / technology.

Photo: Sebin Lazar Reena

What are the elements that make us human? The movements that transpired pondered on the building blocks that make up music itself. A simple Prologue of piano tremolos ushered in Carnatic violin and sax, and in the manner of Minimalism built up a pattern of mood music by repetition and constant variations. That was the basis of Memories of Time, which unfolded slowly but never outliving its welcome.

I Am The Air (Io Sono L’Aria) opened with birdsong and trills from solo piano in the upper registers, over which both violins carved out a duet. If one wondered whether this music was composed or improvised, the answer: both. Wu’s Western violin had its part fully written out while Sebastine’s Carnatic violin was almost wholly improvised.

In Longing, the evening got its first big melody, with Teo’s sax doing the honours. This love song was gradually built up from something simple, an efflorescence much like how life on earth evolved from molecules to cells and then living organisms.

Photo: Sebin Lazar Reena

Similarly, Architecture of Human Civilisation opened with Wu’s Bachian violin solo, single line arpeggios, then double stopping, over which Teo began his improvisation. Tze’s piano joined the fray as did Sebastine’s violin, and a mighty edifice was constructed seemingly from scratch. The movement closed as it began, with Wu’s plaintive solo.

How can science describe emotions like love? The harmonic progessions of Autumn relived the music of Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, admittedly one of Tze’s idols, while both violins brought out different responses in an impassioned duet.

LHC (Large Hadron Collider) was the concert’s only fast piece, befitting CERN’s particle accelerator in Switzerland. Here, rapid piano figurations and saxy riffs churned out the musical equivalent of anti-matter in a kinetically charged atmosphere. In a word, breathtaking.

Photo: Sebin Lazar Reena

Memories of Space returned to the premise of the earlier piece, Memories of Time. This time, the building blocks were canons, the repeating bars of music that distinguished J.S.Bach’s Goldberg Variations and the finale of Cesar Franck’s famous violin sonata.

The closing number The Swan had nothing to do with Saint-Saen’s cello masterpiece, but was based on a raga where the Carnatic violin opened. Tze described it as a piece depicting grace and growth, appropriately in the key of G major, which also echoed the Goldbergs. Here, raga met Bach and jazz in a heady awakening of sorts. What will Tze and Co think of next?

PROJECT LAKSA / Song Ziliang and Friends / Review

PROJECT LAKSA

Song Ziliang and Friends

The Living Room @ The Arts House

Friday (12 July 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 15 July 2013 with the title "More local flavour needed".

When it comes to food, Singaporeans need not be persuaded twice. This would explain how two evenings of the chamber concert Project Laksa at The Arts House were sold out and a matinee had to be added. Audiences had been promised a sumptuous musical programme, topped with a sampling of Prima Taste’s trademarked laksa, Singapore style.

The main dish was the World Premiere of Singaporean composer Chen Zhangyi’s Laksa Cantata, a local spin-off from J.S.Bach’s Coffee Cantata, with a witty and rather endearing libretto by Jack Lin. It is a 20-minute long mini-opera with two arias, two duets and spoken recitatives, accompanied by violin, clarinet and piano. The premise was about two soon-to-be-weds squabbling over whether laksa should be served at their wedding dinner.

Soprano Rebecca Li was the feisty and sharp-tongued Leah, antagonist of dreamy and self-indulgent Stephen, sung by Symphony 92.4 deejay Kiat Goh, whose craving is a steaming bowl of laksa. Chen chose a completely Western idiom for this setting, such that Leah’s Scorned Woman Aria sounded like a Bernsteinesque showpiece, full of syncopations and twists which Li negotiated with much ease.

For Stephen’s Laksa Aria, the inspiration was Benjamin Britten in his more melodious moments, and Goh nailed the words with gusto. And there were titters when he sang, “The flawless complexion of the white bee hoon, wavering in a sea of coconut cream, the tau pok and hae only makes me swoon.”  Together, their duet Agree To Disagree, had another harmonious serving of colloquialisms.

“Some say no harm, like the laksa of Katong. Others have no qualm, but they serve no sotong,” goes another line. With the threat of ma-in-law coming over to stay, the couple settle their differences (no laksa for a day), closing peaceably with a blissful duet that opens, “A new bowl is a new day”.

This enjoyable exercise would have been a greater coup had Chen had mustered a Peranakan or local idiom to spice up the work. Perhaps a detailed study of dondang sayang and related musical traditions, and the liberal use of baba and nyonya patois might yield a more authentic second version of the cantata in the near future.

As mastermind of this project, pianist Song Ziliang also helmed the balance of the 80-minute concert which included cross-cultural and cross-generational explorations in music. The eclectic programme was a bit of a rojak, opening with two piano solos from China, the impressionistic Autumn Moon On Calm Lake and percussive drum-dominated dance Celebrating Our New Life.

Clarinettist Colin Tan and pianist Christine Octaviani then added a klezmer number Sholem-Alekhem, Rov Feidman! by Hungarian Jew Bela Kovacs, which sounded like a dance out of Fiddler On The Roof. Music from two modernist composers who chose to go retro, Russian Alfred Schnittke and Frenchman Darius Milhaud, completed the programme.

Schnittke, better known as a polystylist, took the path of Stravinsky’s Suite Italienne for his Suite In The Old Style for violin and piano, by rehashing baroque dance forms. Violinist Wu Bingling and Song were harmonious throughout, with the occasional dissonance to remind listeners of the century we are living in. They were joined by Tan in Milhaud’s Suite for clarinet trio which looked at old French folkdances and pastorals before closing with a Brazilian twist.

This is Song’s encouraging debut at curating a varied cross-genre programme, one that juxtaposed music and gastronomy. However it is not new, as composer Robert Casteels had done it before. What other mouth-watering prospects does Song and his team have in store, a char kway teow concerto perhaps?  

  

Enough of the music, its time to indulge in Prima Taste's laksa!