RIPPLES / Mervyn Lee Piano Recital / Joey Lau Violin Recital / Review

RIPPLES

MERVYN LEE, Piano Recital

JOEY LAU, Violin Recital

with Lim Yan, Piano

Esplanade Recital Studio

Friday & Saturday 

(11 & 12 August 2023)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 14 August 2023 with the title "Thought-provoking recitals by musical talent".

 

The Kris Foundation, founded by local philanthropist and music-lover Kris Tan, has been presenting concerts showcasing young Singaporean and Singapore-based musical talents since 2009. The roster of artists in its annual series of solo and chamber recitals now reads like a Who’s Who of the classical music scene, including violinists Alan Choo, Loh Jun Hong and Yang Shuxiang, pianists Abigail Sin and Azariah Tan, and harpist Laura Peh.

 

Pianist Mervyn Lee, who also performs harpsichord, viola da gamba and guitar in Red Dot Baroque, looks set to join this pantheon. His intellectually satisfying and demanding solo recital was the perfect showcase of breadth and depth. The two major works included Beethoven’s late Piano Sonata No.28 in A major (Op.101), which was Romantically inflected in his voicing of the opening movement’s main theme. Contrasts were sharply drawn for the second movement’s brisk march, before culminating with the finale’s triumphant play of counterpoint.   

 

Equally trenchant was Bartok’s Out Of Doors, a five-movement suite juxtaposing raw percussive violence with unusually lyrical asides. Most strikingly, its fourth movement entitled The Night’s Music was a inimitable study of silence punctuated by sounds of twittering insects and a nightingale’s call. All this tied in poetically with two selections from Spanish composer Enrique Granados’ Goyescas, displaying yearning in The Maiden and the Nightingale and rhythmic vigour in Fandango by Moonlight. The dance element was also mirrored in two swift Scarlatti Sonatas (K.396 & 427), which were dispatched with mercurial wit and panache.

 

Receiving its world premiere was young Singaporean composer Lim Kang Ning’s All The Bells At Once, a dreamily sonorous work that played on lingering single notes and varied intervals with  intendant resonances and echoes. One was reminded of piano pieces by two late great composers, the Hungarian Gyorgy Ligeti and Australian Peter Sculthorpe, the latter well-known for Asian and Aboriginal influences in his music.

 

On the following evening, Lim’s Memories Of A Daffodil for solo violin was premiered by violinist Joey Lau, who is presently pursuing post-graduate studies in Chicago. A shorter work, it opened with a long lyrical line, possibly of Chinese idiom, later roused into animation before being abruptly cut short. This might be a reflection on the transience of life, later echoed in the recital’s final work.

 

Her other solo was Eugene Ysaye’s Sonata (Op.27 No.3) or Ballade, encompassing a formidable arsenal of technical tricks and thrills which she duly delivered. Lau's acute sense of singing lines, by contrast, found just the right response in Prokofiev's Five Melodies (Op.35bis), originally written for wordless high voice, now partnered with pianist Lim Yan.

 

Both violinist and pianist were taxed to the max in two substantial sonatas. Beethoven’s early Sonata in E flat major (Op.12 No.3) offered an imperious show of virtuosity in its outer movements. In between, serenity and equanamity reigned in the slow movement. This sequence was repeated in Frenchman Francis Poulenc’s Violin Sonata, where seemingly whimsical and uproarious melodies belied something more sombre. Humour and wit were in long supply, but its finale turned to elegiac tones before closing on a total downer.

 

Read the well-written notes (by Lau herself), and one learns that the sonata was dedicated to the memory of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, murdered by fascists in the prime of his life. Whether musing on swooning nightingales or dying daffodils, these thought-provoking recitals show three young musical talents - pianist Mervyn Lee, violinist Joey Lau and composer Lim Kang Ning - to be prime prospects for Singapore’s musical future.  

For the record, the encores performed on both evenings were as follows:

11 August 2023 (Mervyn Lee)

TELEMANN Fantasy in G minor

SCRIABIN Poem in F sharp major, Op.32 No.1

12 August 2023 (Joey Lau and Lim Yan)

FAURE Apres un reve

DRIGO-HEIFETZ Valse Bluette