MATHEMUSICAL ENCOUNTERS: OPENING CONCERT / Margaret Leng Tan Piano Recital / Review

MATHEMUSICAL ENCOUNTERS: 

OPENING CONCERT

Margaret Leng Tan, Piano
Yong Siew Toh Conservatory Concert Hall
Monday (19 February 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 21 February 2024 with the title "Margaret Leng Tan bridges visual arts and music in dynamic concert".

The idea that visual images may be translated into musical sounds is not a new one. Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures At An Exhibition (1874) was a landmark for the piano repertoire. Metamorphoses by the late American composer George Crumb (1929-2022) continued in the same spirit, drawing inspiration from celebrated modern paintings.

Singapore’s high priestess of the avant-garde, Margaret Leng Tan, was a close friend of Crumb. She was the dedicatee of Book I of Metamorphoses, which premiered in 2017. As part of Yong Siew Toh Conservatory’s Mathemusical Encounters conference, Tan gave the first Asian performance of Book II (2018-2020) as a memorial tribute to the composer.
Its ten fantasy-pieces for amplified piano involved techniques beyond playing the 88 black and white keys. Directly strumming, scratching and striking its steel strings, added percussion and vocalisations were all part of the performance. Lest one thought this alienating or esoteric, 54 minutes passed rather swiftly with Tan as a most involving and engaging museum guide.
The music was no more arcane or forbidding as Debussy’s Preludes, and in certain ways, spoke more directly to the listener. It certainly helped that the paintings were projected on a large screen behind the piano. Without fanfare, Tan launched into the first two pieces, based on works by Swiss artist Paul Klee.

Ancient Sound, Abstract On Black centred on hefty chords of fixed intervals, almost corresponding to the painting’s coloured squares and rectangles, accompanied by metallic rasping of the strings. Landscape With Yellow Birds included twittering birdsong with intendent echoes, resonances and repeated notes.


Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World had an apparent serenity but coloured by dissonance and an inner tension. Tan’s arching over the keyboard also mirrored the crouching-crawling posture of the painting’s protagonist. Simon Dinnerstein’s Purple Haze had a pale female nude suspended over some anonymous metropolis. There was a bluesy feel to the right hand’s melody, but the left hand’s ostinato chords implied looming inner-city violence.

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer (Lady In Gold) saw a preponderance of treble notes, the subject’s opulence heightened by chimes and a mallet striking high strings. The polar opposite was Paul Gauguin’s Spirit of the Dead Watching, its dark sense of foreboding suggested by an aboriginal drone, aided by cymbal and a thunder tube’s rumble.

By far the most violent piece was Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, the infamous vision of a Basque town devastated by Nazi bombing during the Spanish Civil War. The pounding martial beats, explosive outbursts and plethoric tinnitus were unmistakable, with Tan’s repeated incantation of “Guernica!” being an indictment against violence. Today, the catchword might easily have been, “Gaza!”

There were two further pieces inspired by Georgia O’Keefe and Marc Chagall, but it was the tenth and final piece, after Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, that had the most resonance. This was also Crumb’s last composition, one of hallucinatory stillness and ultimate mystery. With Tan’s wordless singing to close, one truly felt a spirit leaving the earth, rising to the vast expanse above.