RESOUNDING / SEE NING HUI Piano Recital / Review

 

RESOUNDING

SEE NING HUI Piano Recital

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (22 February 2026)

Piano recitals are often conceived on themes of form or programme, such as sonatas or stories and histories, thus it was refreshing to encounter young pianist See Ning Hui’s recital built upon resonances and sound textures. The lecturer at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts has a knack of programme building, and her recital entitled ReSounding exploited a myriad of sounds by the drawing of pairs: a pair of Debussy Preludes, a pair of women composers, a pair of Singaporean composers, a pair of sonata forms... all these coalescing into a very satisfying whole.

The recital opened with voluminous sound, as Debussy’s Ce q’ua vu le vent d’ouest (What The West Wind Saw) from Preludes Book One generated torrents of gail-force proportions. Easily the Frenchman’s most violent number, the wide wash of sonorities sweeping the entire extent of the keyboard was awe-inspiring, later settling down for Singaporean composer Ng Yu Hng’s The Memory Mansion at the End of Time (2021).

A dreamy soundscape was conjured by mostly occupying the upper half registers of the grand piano. Bell sounds emanate from the right hand while left hand ostinatos are gently obscured by generous pedalling generating a misty mystique. Time moved leisurely, expanding broadly instead of working itself into a frenzy. Senses are assailed in the politest way possible, and Ning Hui’s persuasive manner convinces one that the memory of all that is only temporal. An ephemeral experience and was gone.

The major work of the recital was Fanny Hensel’s Ostersonate (Easter Sonata), composed in 1828 but unperformed till 1972, and assumed to be by her illustrious and more famous brother Felix Mendelssohn. Ning Hui recounted the first UK performance (rightfully under her name) in 2017 by Sofya Gulyak, and her performance left one wondering how it could have been mistaken to be Felix’s all these years. The opening movement displayed a harmonic daring and adventurousness that far outstripped the prim and proper Herr Mendelssohn himself.

The spirituality of Bach imbued the slow movement’s lament, and with the ensuing fugue one began to imagine the scores of Cesar Franck from decades later. Only in the Scherzo third movement’s lightness and fleetness did the Mendelssohn siblings find some shared parity. The tumultuous finale saw Fanny possessed, with rumblings which agitate with the passion of Robert Schumann’s sonatas. Lil’ bro Felix was being left behind, and when A minor suddenly turned to A major, a Bachian chorale rang out a la Franz Liszt for the sonata to close on a quiet but sublime and elevated high. Fanny was a Romantic pioneer and visionary of sorts, and Ning Hui’s convincing reading made that clear for one and all.

Opening the second half with Debussy’s Les Collines d’Anacapri (Hills of Anacapri), its tarantella rhythm and penchant for song came into the fore. This paved the way for Chopin’s Fantasy in F minor (Op.49), where the accents were focused on its Polishness, the nationalism manifested in its march rhythm and that central chorale. Its sonata form had became secondary to the sound created.

Birdsong filled the air in the world premiere of Toh Yan Ee’s Within A Cage of Echoes. Her inspiration were the bird-singing communities of Singapore’s heartland neighbourhoods. Like the earlier local work, the right hand playing in the keyboard’s treble registers dominated, with a counterpoint provided by other captive songsters. With the dissonances, repeated notes and echoes of long held harmonies, one was reminded of Messiaen (inevitably) but also the Oriental sound worlds of Takemitsu and Peter Sculthorpe. Both these local works deserve to be heard again and soon as well.

The formal programme closed with the African-American vernacular of Florence Price’s Fantasie Negre No.2, a Singapore premiere. Why have we not heard such soulful music before? Where the world of Negro spirituals (I won’t avoid the “n” word here) meets with the gospel idiom, we have another sound world that felt comforting and at home. Here, Ning Hui’s masterly programme had brought the disparate sound worlds of musical impressionism, foreign and local cultures, birdsong and spirituality together in a sonorously unforgettable whole.

Her sublime encore of three selections from Robert Schumann’s Etudes in Variation Form on a theme of Beethoven (the second movement of his Seventh Symphony) felt otherworldly. We were no longer thinking of Beethoven or Schumann, but looking and hearing somewhere far into the future.