TRANSCENDENTAL / KIT ARMSTRONG PLAYS BACH & LISZT / Review

TRANSCENDENTAL

KIT ARMSTRONG PLAYS BACH & LISZT

Victoria Concert Hall

Friday (3 June 2022)

 

Piano season is now open. For me, it began last Sunday at the Steinway Youth Piano Competition, with eight hours or so of young people celebrating piano music. The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition commenced last night, live-streamed from Fort Worth, Texas on the Internet. This evening was America-born pianist of British-Taiwanese parentage Kit Armstrong’s Singapore debut recital. This is to be followed in short succession by Tedd Joselson’s three-concerto evening and the Singapore International Piano Festival next week. A surfeit of keyboard high jinks beckons.

 

Kit Armstrong is one of those precious few child prodigies who have successfully transcended the hype and hoopla associated with extreme precocity to become an artist of maturity. Now a virtuoso pianist and composer, the evidence is his approach to music, transcending mere mechanical notes from a printed score to the ability to internalise and deliver the composers’ intended message. His preambles before playing showed he also understood the “philosophy of the piano” (to borrow the words of the late music commentator Jeremy Siepmann), by transforming the technical to become expressive. According to him, music must transcend its origins to tell coherent stories.    

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

 

J.S.Bach’s 15 Sinfonias or Three-Part Inventions formed the concert’s shorter first half. One might dismiss these as “children’s music”, no thanks to graded examinations of the Associated Bored of the Royal Stools of Music (ABRSM), but Armstrong crafted these with clarity and colour. Progressing from C major to B minor, and alternating between major and minor keys, a kaleidoscope of sound was revealed. With every voice clearly enunciated and skilfully woven into a cohesive whole, there was something spiritual about this progression. A great pity there had to be a break after the ninth invention, when Armstrong sat patiently at the C.Bechstein grand (specially flown in from Berlin for this recital) to admit the entry of latecomers. No artists should be subjected to such banalities. Grrr...

 

Thankfully no such disruptions affected the second half, occupied by Liszt’s Twelve Transcendental Etudes. From the outset of the opening Preludio (No.1) one knew that Armstrong was neither a banger nor a rusher. He instinctively knew when to hold back and when to emote and exude. And has there been a more aptly named artist to tame these beasts? No.2 showcased Paganinian prestidigitation and dexterity, while Paysage (No.3), supposedly the “easiest” of the dozen, became a true poem of expressive lyricism.

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

 

The barnstorming proper began in the next five etudes, ushered by the arpeggiated chords of Mazeppa (No.4), played very detached, before the wild horseback rumble through the Ukraine. Russian tanks would not have stood a chance. Gravity was suspended for the gossamer filigree of Feux Follets (No.5), a true miracle of rapid light-fingered wizardry. Thunderous chords and octaves distinguished Nos.6 through 8 without a hint of empty bluster. Seldom has Eroica (No.7) or Wild Jagd (No.8) been served with the widest possible range of dynamics and sonorities. Virtuosity was the means to an end, but never the end itself.

 

Photo: Ung Ruey Loon

Ricordanza (No.9) was shorn of all cheap sentimentality, instead becoming the indelible memory of pain and regret. Likewise, the expansive Harmonies du soir (No.11) expressed an unspeakable ecstacy of consumated passion, clearly the result of the preceding Allegro agitato molto (No.10, sometimes called Appassionata). The snow ploughs of Chasse-neige (No.12), where one really felt swirling eddies, provided a chilly close, but one greeted with the warmest of applause (and a standing ovation).

 

True to from, it was Back to Baroque for the encores. John Bull’s Fantasia in D minor showed that Tudor music could sound as improvisatory and modern as jazz (with a bass-line dressed up with right hand frillery). Armstrong called this “the emancipation of music”, followed by the Prelude and Fugue No.1 in C major from Book One of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. “If you can’t like this, you can’t love music,” as Armstrong quoted Saint-Saens. They were both right on the money.

Kit Armstrong was presented by Altenburg Arts.