KAM-HARWOOD-LIM TRIO / Review

KAM-HARWOOD-LIM TRIO

Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall

Friday (6 October 2023)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 10 October 2023 with the title "From death to sunshine in a night".

 

Lovers of chamber music have never had it so good. In recent months, they were treated to excellent concerts by the T’ang and Concordia Quartets, More Than Music duo and Yong Siew Toh Conservatory’s “million dollar” piano quintet. Now meet the piano trio formed by London-based Singaporean violinist Kam Ning, British cellist Richard Harwood and Britain-trained Singaporean pianist Lim Yan in a programme that traced the history of the piano trio medium.

 

Joseph Haydn was the “father of the piano trio”, having composed as many as 45 piano trios. Of these, only one is performed with any frequency, his Piano Trio in G major (Hob.XV:25) published in 1795. Opening the concert, a more congenial work would be hard to find, one oozing salon charm from every pore. As with such early trios, the keyboardist was the acknowledged leader, with string players providing the accompaniment.  

 

While Kam’s violin had some pretty melodies to mull over, spare a thought for Harwood’s cello, whose role was to play the perfect sidekick to his partners. Even in the Rondo all’Ongarese, popularly known as the Gypsy Rondo, it was Lim’s piano which dominated, overseeing the abrupt shifts in tempos and modes which made for an enjoyable ride.

 

All this was turned upon its head in Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No.2 in E minor (Op.67), where Harwood was obliged to open with harmonics, effecting tinnitus in excruciating high registers. This wartime work, premiered in 1944, made for uneasy listening because of its grim countenance. Grating dissonances, bare octaves and insistently hammering rhythms were par for the course, the aural equivalent of treading barefooted on broken glass.

Photo: Michael Huang

 

The piano was now an instrument of percussion, content with issuing beats over which strings ran riot, culminating in the second movement’s demented fast waltz. The slow third movement was typical Shostakovich, a passacaglia with long-held piano chords establishing a funereal and plodding pace for short variations to unfold.

Photo: Michael Huang

 

This led into the finale’s infamous “dance of death”, centered on a Jewish tune which once heard, would be an earworm for the ages. A vision of the Holocaust, with Jews led to their graves by a village band, is the chilling and abiding memory evoked by this music.

 

The trio gave a take-no-prisoners performance, and the audience held its breath for a few moments after its subdued close before erupting in loud applause. They had been compelled to understand what the music meant.

 

As dark and sobering as the first half closed, the second half was lit by the sunshine of Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No.1 in D minor (Op.49), likely the most performed of piano trios in Singapore. Its sheer likeability has to do with the Biedermeier years of 1839, where a cult of beauty was prized over mundane reality.

 

The Kam-Harwood-Lim trio made every movement a veritable song without words, besides letting rip with the early Romantic era’s trademarked prestidigitation. This chamber concert with marked contrasts had to close on a cheerful and optimistic note.  

It is chilling to think that just one day after this concert, the Jews of Israel were subject to a second Holocaust by the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas. Hundreds of innocents attending a peace concert in Israel were marched to their deaths and slaughtered, and many others murdered in their homes. It appears that "people who forget the past are doomed to repeat it" (George Santayana).