VIVA CONCERTI:
WHERE THE TWAIN SHALL MEET
Niu Niu (Piano) with
Metropolitan Festival Orchestra
Esplanade Concert Hall
Tuesday (27 October 2026), 7.30 pm
This review was published in The Straits Times on 30 October 2026 with the title "Pianist Niu Niu pulls off eight concertos with soul and no showboating".
Experiencing eight concertos in a single evening is the musical equivalent of feasting at an international buffet – a guarantee of indigestion. Yet there was method in the madness of this mammoth undertaking by the Chinese former child prodigy pianist Niu Niu (Zhang Shengliang).
Viva Concerti was the fundraiser for the 20th anniversary of VIVA Foundation for Children with Cancer whose chairperson is Mrs Jennifer Yeo, herself a fine amateur pianist. Supported by the Metropolitan Festival Orchestra conducted by Chan Tze Law, the first half was crafted like some Romantic mega-concerto of three movements.
The first movement of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with all its majesty accompanied by crunching piano chords opened the show. Niu Niu announced himself as a highly musical and sensitive soul, whose virtuoso feats are accomplished without extraneous gestures or showboating.
Those tired of self-serving antics by pianists pandering to popular appeal will find him a refreshing change, as he lets the music speak for itself. In the Romance from Fryderyk Chopin’s First Piano Concerto, lyrical sensibilities ruled, backed by silky-smooth orchestral strings.
Its sublime conclusion in the key of E major segued seamlessly into the finale of Sergei Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, which also opens in the same key. Here, the tendency to milk the big melody was hard to resist but allied with a superior technical arsenal for a spectacular close, such quibbles were rendered irrelevant.
The second half opened with the Butterfly Lovers Concerto by Chen Gang and He Zhanhao, in an abridged version with Niu Niu making his fiddling debut on a 1753 G.B.Guadagnini violin from the Rin Collection. A slender tone and sounding over-cautious made this his least successful outing.
It was back to keyboard swashbuckling for the dramatic but short first movement from Franz Liszt’s First Piano Concerto, which in E flat major became the perfect prelude to the joyously romping Rondo of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, also called the Emperor.
So far, Niu Niu had been mostly strait-jacketed by classical forms and norms, and he made a spectacular departure with the only work performed in its entirety - George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Piquant harmonies in various passages soon gave way to long stretches of free improvisation, fleshing out the work to brilliant effect. That alone was worth the price of entry.
The eighth and final concert was the finale, Defend The Yellow River, from the Yellow River Concerto composed by a committee of six from Beijing’s Central Philharmonic Society. All the tropes and cliches from earlier concertos came to a flag-waving, tub-thumping and jingoistic head.
Niu Niu’s three encores included the delightful Beautiful Garden by Jennifer Yeo (composed as a 19-year-old) performed with orchestral accompaniment, his own bossa nova-filled Sunny Day and an outlandish improvisation of Nessun Dorma from Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot. After such keyboard riches, none shall sleep indeed.
All photos by courtesy of
VIVA Foundation for Children with Cancer.
