FAIRYTALES AND OTHER STORIES / More Than Music & Friends / Review

FAIRYTALES AND OTHER STORIES

More Than Music & Friends

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (18 September 2022)

 

More Than Music is a duo formed in 2013 by violinist Loh Jun Hong and pianist Abigail Sin, who were fellow students at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory. Their chamber concerts have covered more than duo music, as they frequently involve friends who play other instruments, including guitar and trumpet. This evening, they were joined by SSO musicians, principal cellist Ng Pei-Sian and violist Wang Dandan, and in their typically informal style, waxed lyrical about the music.

 

This concert opened with just strings, Jun Hong and Dandan in Sibelius’ rarely heard Duo for violin and viola. A world apart from his gritty symphonic works, this piece oozed a somewhat austere kind of Nordic salon charm. The violin’s melodic lines were well supported by the viola’s harmonisations which were anything but facile or superficial. This served as an apt “once upon a time” introduction to the fare to follow.

 

Dandan came into her own for the first two movements of Robert Schumann’s Märchenbilder (Fairytale Pictures, Op.113). There are no actual stories attached to the pieces, but one can imagine the scenes. The lyricism and dreamy mood of the opening brought out from her a lovely tone, luscious and full-bodied, contrasted with the more resolute and martial strains of the piece that followed.

 

Abigail was a most sensitive accompanist, later continuing into Janacek’s Pohadka (Fairy Tale) with Pei-Sian’s cello as protagonist. The Czech’s musical idiom is unmistakable, vividly conjuring a fantasy world of yearning nostalgia and loss of innocence through simple and sharply contoured motifs. Pizzicatos opened the first of three short and linked movements, with a turn for the dramatic looming with each page. The second was more whimsical, rapturous in part yet tinged by an inner lament, with folk music strongly colouring this and the final section. Audiences are all ears whenever Pei-Sian plays, and this was no different.

 

More folk music followed with Samuel Dushkin’s violin and piano transcription of Stravinsky’s Danse Russe from Petrushka. Ensemble could have been a little tidier in this riproaring music, but there was no denying the energy and exhilaration the duo generated.

 

The main event of the concert was Brahms’ First Piano Quartet in G minor (Op.25), four movements of symphonic pretensions by the young German. Arnold Schoenberg was moved to orchestrate it, in a famously overblown piece bantered as “Brahms’ Fifth Symphony". It is a wonderfully ambitious work, so dripping with red meat and raw emotion as to become endearing in a certain strange way. The foursome, which had greatly impressed in Brahms’ Third Piano Quartet last year, was no less trenchant this time around.

 

The beefy musical material, offset by Pei-Sian’s lyrical cello in the second subject, was well-sustained in a performance bristling with pathos and tension. With Brahms, even an Intermezzo could be laden with an inner tension, but a scherzo-like section signalled a lightening of mood. The slow movement in E flat major showed that unison voices could sound just as profound, then rising in a march-like episode to a full-blooded and ecstatic climax before gently retiring.

 

Guilty pleasure has always been derived in the final Rondo alla Zingarese, a rollicking Hungarian-styled dance movement possibly more infectious than Covid itself. In supporting the strings, Abigail’s prestidigitation was always assured, later culminating with a cascading cadenza down to the foot of the keyboard. This exciting romp is guaranteed to bring out the loudest of cheers from the audience, and so it proved.

 

Still sticking with the dance theme, the quartet’s encore was Alexander Oon’s rocking arrangement of Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango. Its rhythms were more than infectious, the performance more than exuberant, offering a more than satisfying end to a concert that delivered more than expected.