FRACTURED MIRRORS / Off-Menu / Review

 

FRACTURED MIRRORS 

Off-Menu 

Conservatory Concert Hall 

Thursday (6 February 2025) 

There is a new piano trio in town, and it's called Off-Menu. Formed by veterans of Singapore’s chamber music scene, it comprises violinist Yang Shuxiang (concertmaster of re:Sound), cellist Leslie Tan (founding member of T’ang Quartet and Red Dot Baroque) and pianist-composer Jonathan Shin, with the intention to specialise in off-beat repertoire and unusual juxtapositions of chamber music. 

Its concert debut opened with Shin’s Four Pictures of Mid-Winter Boston (2017), previously heard in a 2022 Concordia Piano Quartet concert. It sounded even better on this occasion, the neo-Impressionist tonal idiom coming across more vividly, beginning with a visage of snow in a quiet and atmospheric opening movement. 

What followed were two brief scherzo-like vignettes of morning rush-hour traffic and a snowstorm with Petrushka-like dissonances and glissandi. The final picture was mostly Yang’s show, with a beautiful extended solo that married the pentatonic world of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending with Paganinian arpeggios, before his partners returned for a placid close. This was Shin’s paean to New England solitude. 

The Singapore premiere of American-Russian composer Lera Auerbach’s Triptych – This Mirror Has Three Faces was next. The threesome explained its form as a kind of renaissance altarpiece formed by three folding blocs in five movements. The work recalled the polystylism of late Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, an anarchic mishmash involving modernist hair-pulling dissonances, neoclassical tropes, dance music and sentimental melody, all trapped within a carnival funhouse with distorting mirrors and prisms. 

Photo: Ong Shu Chen

That sounds wild but the trio brought out a very cohesive reading that repays relistening. One hopes this performance was recorded. Its individual movements were linked but the sense of dynamic changes taking place when one part segued into the next were well-defined. The piano intoned chime-like chords, a recurring feature, while screeching string dissonances endeavoured to find some resolution. 

There were moments of loud, violent rumbling turbulences, giving way to an off-kilter waltz where string pizzicatos were bounced off tipsy slurs and a frequent sliding between wide range of pitches. Wiry sul ponticello (bowing near the bridge) effects were de rigeuer, so were quasi-baroque exercises on the violin in the fourth movement, before the finale’s sickly sweet melody – a memorable one at that – dominated the proceedings before the work coming to a soft quizzical end. Had too many shots of vodka? This trio had that kind of effect. 

To prove that Off-Menu could still perform music of a more conventional kind, Schubert’s Piano Trio No.2 in E flat major (D.929) was programmed. This classic is scarcely esoteric, but how often does one hear it in concert? That is our loss because the late monumental work (almost 50 minutes in duration) is cut from the same congenial fabric as the better-known Trout Quintet. You won’t find a more perfect unison for the opening bars of the Allegro, in a reading of such cohesiveness that the camaraderie was palpable from the very first bar. The warmth in the strings perfectly complimented the piano’s scintillating running high notes, working to a passionate high in the development section. 

The Andante con moto second movement in C minor was a slow march (the sort that Schumann would later revel in) for which Tan’s cello had the most say. His theme would later figure prominently in the finale. It was typical of Schubert to have his weightiest material in the first two movements while take it easy later for the final two movements. The Scherzo contrasted a gemutlich opening canonic theme with a more martial sounding Trio, but the whole atmosphere was still congenial with the threesome lapping it up. 

The Rondo finale’s Allegro moderato was even lighter in feel, its Hungarian-flavoured melody (more subtle than usual) with the piano’s repeated notes (now sounding like a cimbalom) lighting up the proceedings. A welcome return of the slow movement’s cello theme now made more sense as its provenance was probably Hungarian as well. The interplay of both Magyar themes made this rather repetitious movement (with the trio performing the longer unedited version with 100 more bars) all the more absorbing. 

The joie de vivre displayed by Schubert in his final year made this music even more poignant, and this YST (Yang, Shin and Tan) Trio could not have made a more spirited maiden voyage with its inclusion. It is hoped that it won’t be too long before Off-Menu’s next concert.

Till we meet again,
for our next Off-Menu!