QUANTUM STATE / TO Ensemble / Review

 

QUANTUM STATE

TO Ensemble

Esplanade Recital Studio

Sunday (1 March 2026)

This review was published on 3 March 2026 with the title "TO Ensemble explores what humans are made of in entertaining programme".

Concerts by TO Ensemble have traditionally been founded on futuristic stories. Dystopian worlds, interstellar travel and speculative fiction are par for the course, but its latest offering was more down to earth: science and what we are composed of.

Led by composer and jazz pianist Tze Toh, his quartet on this occasion was formed by Wu Bingling (violin), Lazar T. Sebastine (Carnatic violin) and Teo Boon Chye (alto saxophone), performing an enjoyable 75-minute concert without intermission. Within this configuration, the players and their instruments represented respectively space, humanity, nature and science / technology.

Photo: Sebin Lazar Reena

What are the elements that make us human? The movements that transpired pondered on the building blocks that make up music itself. A simple Prologue of piano tremolos ushered in Carnatic violin and sax, and in the manner of Minimalism built up a pattern of mood music by repetition and constant variations. That was the basis of Memories of Time, which unfolded slowly but never outliving its welcome.

I Am The Air (Io Sono L’Aria) opened with birdsong and trills from solo piano in the upper registers, over which both violins carved out a duet. If one wondered whether this music was composed or improvised, the answer: both. Wu’s Western violin had its part fully written out while Sebastine’s Carnatic violin was almost wholly improvised.

In Longing, the evening got its first big melody, with Teo’s sax doing the honours. This love song was gradually built up from something simple, an efflorescence much like how life on earth evolved from molecules to cells and then living organisms.

Photo: Sebin Lazar Reena

Similarly, Architecture of Human Civilisation opened with Wu’s Bachian violin solo, single line arpeggios, then double stopping, over which Teo began his improvisation. Tze’s piano joined the fray as did Sebastine’s violin, and a mighty edifice was constructed seemingly from scratch. The movement closed as it began, with Wu’s plaintive solo.

How can science describe emotions like love? The harmonic progessions of Autumn relived the music of Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, admittedly one of Tze’s idols, while both violins brought out different responses in an impassioned duet.

LHC (Large Hadron Collider) was the concert’s only fast piece, befitting CERN’s particle accelerator in Switzerland. Here, rapid piano figurations and saxy riffs churned out the musical equivalent of anti-matter in a kinetically charged atmosphere. In a word, breathtaking.

Photo: Sebin Lazar Reena

Memories of Space returned to the premise of the earlier piece, Memories of Time. This time, the building blocks were canons, the repeating bars of music that distinguished J.S.Bach’s Goldberg Variations and the finale of Cesar Franck’s famous violin sonata.

The closing number The Swan had nothing to do with Saint-Saen’s cello masterpiece, but was based on a raga where the Carnatic violin opened. Tze described it as a piece depicting grace and growth, appropriately in the key of G major, which also echoed the Goldbergs. Here, raga met Bach and jazz in a heady awakening of sorts. What will Tze and Co think of next?