MEGAN LOW Violin Recital / Review

 

MEGAN LOW Violin Recital 

with Cherie Khor (Piano) 

Esplanade Recital Studio 

Sunday (5 May 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 7 May 2024 with the title "Award-winning violinist shows eclectic artistry".

The Goh Soon Tioe Centenary Award is an annual monetary prize benefiting young string players at the dawn of their professional careers. Named after Singapore’s pioneering musician, pedagogue, conductor and entrepreneur Goh Soon Tioe (1911-1982), notable past recipients have included violinist Alan Choo and guitarist Kevin Loh, who have become musical pioneers in their own right. 

Violinist Megan Low, the 2023 awardee and final year student at the Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, looks to join this illustrious roster. Her 90-minute solo recital partnered by pianist Cherie Khor was an impressive showcase of eclectic artistry and understated virtuosity. 

Opening with Johannes Brahms’ Violin Sonata No.1 in G major (Op.78), any hint of visible stage anxiety or nerves was dispelled by a quiet confidence that shone through. The highly-exposed melodic line came across with purity of tone and excellent intonation. 

Although much of the German composer’s chamber music is dominated by dense piano textures, Low was never cowed and the performance became a true partnership of equals. The sonata’s final movement, based on his darkly intense Regenlied (Rain Song), exuded a nervous tension that never flagged until its subdued end.

Photo: Gilbert Chan

Low’s solo segment dropped the usual suspects of J.S.Bach, Paganini and Ysaye, instead opting for Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk’s Caprice (1964). This thorny 5-minute exercise encompassed all of the former composers’ tricks of the trade, including chromatic passages, multiple-stopping and piquant pizzicatos, before rounding off with a vigorous folk-dance. 

Photo: Gilbert Chan

Accomplished with heady aplomb, this led to another rarity in Fritz Kreisler’s Viennese Rhapsodic Fantasietta, possibly its first public performance in Singapore. Opening with a dizzying cadenza of almost indeterminate tonality, the music eventually settled in a comfortable E flat major. 

Here the romance began, its easy gemütlich (pleasant and cosy) air lovingly voiced by Low, later giving way to that echt-Viennese of movements, the irrepressible waltz. Composed in 1932, its harmonic opulence and carefree mood - brilliantly captured - belied the years of darkness and doom to come. 

The sense of foreboding eschewed in the Kreisler would appear in Henryk Wieniawski’s Faust Fantasy, based on popular themes from Charles Gounod’s eponymous opera. Some consider this work discursive and overlong, but the duo kept the narrative alive with playing that was always on the edge. 

An opening piano solo gave way to the violin’s cadenza that established its virtuoso credentials, before waxing lyrical in a series of arias. The demonic aspect reared its head in Mephistophele’s Song of the Golden Calf (Le veau d’or), where the temperature rose to such heights as to prompt a premature outburst of applause from the audience. 

The definitive close came with the familiar Waltz (Ainsi que la brise legere), where Low obliged with its outrageous sequence of harmonics and scales. It was not all immaculate but the audience got the idea, according the performers with the most vociferous approval possible.

Photo: Gilbert Chan