pianomania: CON FUOCO / NICHOLAS HO Piano Recital / Review

CON FUOCO

NICHOLAS HO Piano Recital

Victoria Concert Hall

Tuesday (31 January 2023)

There was a time when Singapore’s best young pianists chose to stay abroad, where educational and performance opportunities were plentiful. There was simply no market for professional musicians to thrive and survive in Singapore, then deemed a “cultural desert”. All that has changed, with the milieu favourable for pianists like Shane Thio, Lim Yan and Nicholas Loh to return and enrich our musical scene. Add the name of hotshot pianist Nicholas Ho to that list of returning talents.

Ho, whose teachers included Ong Lip Tat and Tedd Joselson in Singapore, Edward Auer and Ran Dank in USA, is completing his Doctorate in Cincinnati, Ohio. His latest recital displayed a rather different kind of pianist, one with unusually wide tastes, and also a composer of compelling gifts. The recital opened conventionally with Joseph Haydn’s Sonata in E minor (Hob.XVI:34), imbued with a nervous energy in the opening Presto, contrasted by a thoughtful Adagio. Completing this short masterpiece was a Rondo which flitted from minor to major keys, with Nicholas fully bringing out its good (and innocentemente) humour.

Transcriptions of Vladimir Horowitz have become wildly popular but Nicholas chose instead to perform four original pieces, all early works. The Waltz in F minor has an elegant and swarthy charm, contrasted with the more familiar Danse Excentrique (or Moment Exotique, which Horowitz recorded), almost a second cousin to Debussy’s Golliwogg Cakewalk and General Lavine – Excentrique (probably where its title came from). Some of the harmonies are ravishing. Much less well-known are his Etude-Fantaisie (the influence of Rachmaninov’s Moment Musicaux Op.16 No.2 is obvious) and Fragment Douloreux, which was certainly not a fragment. This was more a Scriabinesque poeme of the late years where dissonances and volatile outbreaks of violence abound. Nicholas performed all these in a manner born.

Closing the first half was likely the first public performance of Yehenara, a tone poem for piano by Singaporean musical-meister Dick Lee. The title is the Manchu name of the infamous Empress Dowager Cixi, whose tumultuous reign and court intrigues spelt the end of China’s Ching dynasty. Bell sounds and an idee fixe of seven notes dominated the music, which worked its way like a procession in passacaglia form. Harmonies were lush and darkly hued, atmospherically brought out by Nicholas, the essence of its 12-or-so minutes would find its way into Lee’s musical Forbidden City.

The piece de resistance of the concert was the world premiere of Nicholas Ho’s own 12 Etudes in its revised edition. These have been influenced by Liszt’s (or Alkan’s) transcendental technique but are closer in idiom to Debussy, Ligeti and Marc-Andre Hamelin’s famous dozens. Each etude was dedicated to Nicholas’ teachers and exploits different facets of a pianist’s technical armamentarium.

Can you spot a Star Trek motif
in the left hand?

Rapid rhythms possess most of the pieces but feathery lightness and playing of utter sensuousness were also in evidence. One etude (for composition teacher Tan Chan Boon, the only Singaporean) was conceived for left hand alone, and another for both hands an octave apart (a salute to Chopin’s Sonata No.2 and Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.2). There was a set of variations on the B-A-C-H motif, and two with fugal conclusions. There was never a dull moment in these 50 minutes, which Nicholas ripped through completely from memory, before closing with an imposing Prelude and Fugue a la Hamelin. And did one notice a Star Trek motif inserted within the Prelude, before the piece launched itself into the stratosphere, infinity and beyond?

Returning to Earth, Nicholas performed two encores, the Sarabande from J.S.Bach’s Partita No.1 and his own transcription for left hand of Queen’s Love Of My Life. Leopold Godowsky would have been mightily proud.