pianomania: EMPATHY IN A FRACTURED WORLD / ODYSSEY / Piano Recitals by CHERRY GE & JEFFERSON DARMAWAN / Review

EMPATHY IN A FRACTURED WORLD

CHERRY GE Piano Recital

Bechstein Music World

Saturday (13 December 2025), 1.30 pm

ODYSSEY

JEFFERSON DARMAWAN Piano Recital

Esplanade Recital Studio

Saturday (13 December 2025), 7.30 pm

This review was published in The Straits Times on 16 December 2025 with the title "Pianists Cherry Ge and Jefferson Darmawan offer nuanced musical stories in two recitals".

This has been a bumper year for piano recitals in Singapore, with legendary pianists (Eliso Virsaladze, Kun-Woo Paik and Robert Levin) and competition winners (Eric Lu, Seong-Jin Cho and Vadym Kholodenko) all making appearances here to critical acclaim. Singaporean and locally-based pianists should however not be ignored for their contributions, including two marathon concerts of Maurice Ravel’s piano music and these two recitals held within the same day.

Photo: Eminey Lee

Singaporean pianist Cherry Ge, presently a Masters student at London’s Royal Academy of Music, gave an hour-long lecture recital presented by Bechstein Music World. Opening with Canadian super-virtuoso pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin’s Toccata on l’Homme Arme, she displayed fleet fingering and lightness of touch in the fantasy on a popular Middle Ages song (The Armed Man), after she had sung it in French.

This was followed by Czech composer Leos Janacek’s Sonata I.X.1905, also entitled On The Street, a sobering and touching requiem to a student stabbed to death during a demonstration in Brno. She displayed a keen sense of musical story-telling, from nervous anticipation in the first movement (Presentiment), to an angst-ridden build-up and fatal climax (Death), before a denouement of quiet resignation.

The longest work, at almost half-an-hour, was Robert Schumann’s multi-movement Humoreske (Op.20). This was no light Dvorakian trifle, but a study of contrasting and rapidly shifting emotions, where outright humour played just a small part. Ge alternated lyricism with whimsicality, yearning and outright virtuosity, before closing with no little pomp. Her encore of Frederic Chopin’s melancholic Mazurka in A minor (Op.17 No.4) summed up what her recital was about – empathy.

Photo: Carissa Chan

Just as diverse but almost double the length was the recital by Indonesia-born Jefferson Darmawan, now permanent resident and scientist in A*Star (Agency for Science, Technology and Research). Paying tribute to his homeland, he opened with Part Three of Polish pianist-composer Leopold Godowsky’s Java Suite.

It comprised three stylised pentatonic dances, followed by the perfumed Gardens of Buitenzorg, immersed in impressionist colour before concluding with the bustling and lively Streets of Old Batavia. Described as phonoramas or tonal journeys, these highly descriptive essays could scarcely be better or more sensitively played.

By contrast, Franz Liszt’s Dante Sonata from his Italian book of Years of Pilgrimage, received the most polite reading thought possible, where hellfire and brimstone of the Inferno need no longer be feared. Its unlikely congeniality was far better suited for Chopin’s Barcarolle, where lilting lyricism and filigreed finery found a happy equal.

Photo: Carissa Chan

The recital’s tour de force was the Singapore premiere of Russian composer Nikolai Medtner’s Second Improvisation (Op.47), comprising 15 variations on the sinuous and elusive Song of the Water Nymph. Its half-hour of thorny chromaticism and fantastical imagery was met with a most trenchant response. With every detail carefully and lovingly attended to, its musical narrative unfolded and progressed with a definitive air of inexorability and finality. The Medtner cult – one that is steadily growing in Singapore - could not have a more sympathetic interpreter.

Darmawan completed his exhaustive showing with two generous encores, Maurice Ravel’s impressionist Jeux d’eau (Fountains) commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Frenchman’s birth, and a rare performance of Claude Debussy’s Ballade. Pianophiles here have been well served in these two exceptional recitals.